Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Saturday, January 31, 2004
BARELY A SCIENCE, "IF IT IS A SCIENCE AT ALL"
If you think that psychiatry and psychology are "hard" sciences, I strongly suggest you take the time to read this illuminating and disturbing two-part article by psychologist Lauren Slater. She begins by recounting a now-famous experiment, a "trick" if you will, that took place 30 years ago:
In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, "Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?"When the experiment was concluded, Rosenhan published his findings:Surprisingly, so the story goes, all eight were not busy the next month, and all eight - three psychologists, one graduate student, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife - agreed to take the time to try this treacherous trick, along with Rosenhan himself, who could hardly wait to get started. ...
Rosenhan instructed his confederates very, very carefully. Five days prior to the chosen date, they were to stop shaving, showering and brushing their teeth. And then they were, on the appointed date, to disperse to different parts of the country, east to west, and present themselves at various psychiatric emergency rooms. Some of the hospitals Rosenhan had chosen were posh and built of white brick; others were state-run gigs with urine-scented corridors and graffiti-scratched walls. The pseudopatients were to present themselves and say words along these lines: "I am hearing a voice. It is saying thud." Rosenhan specifically chose this complaint because nowhere in psychiatric literature are there any reports of any person hearing a voice that contains such obvious cartoon angst.
Upon further questioning, the eight pseudopatients were to answer honestly, save for name and occupation. They were to feign no other symptoms. Once on the ward, if admitted, they were immediately to say that the voice had disappeared and that they now felt fine.
Rosenhan's paper describing his findings, On Being Sane In Insane Places, was published in Science, where it burst like a bomb on the world of psychiatry. Early in the article, Rosenhan lays it on the line. He claims that diagnosis is not carried within the person, but within the context, and that any diagnostic process that lends itself so readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one. The paper generated a flood of fluorescent missives....And consider this remarkable revelation of the depths of hatred unleashed by anyone who dares to challenge "conventional wisdom":
Robert Spitzer, one of the 20th century's most prominent psychiatrists and a severe critic of Rosenhan, wrote a 1975 article in the Journal Of Abnormal Psychology, in response to Rosenhan's findings. "Some foods taste delicious but leave a bad aftertaste. So it is with Rosenhan's study," he said. ... Spitzer later says, in a phone conversation with me, "And this whole business of thud. Rosenhan uses that as proof of how ridiculous psychiatrists are because there had never been any reports before of 'thud' as an auditory hallucination. So what? As I wrote, once I had a patient whose chief presenting complaint was a voice saying, 'It's OK, it's OK.' I know of no such report in the literature. This doesn't mean there isn't real distress."For me, the following identifies the genuinely significant aspect of this experiment:I don't want to challenge Spitzer, but a voice saying, "It's OK" sounds pretty OK to me.
Spitzer pauses. "So how is David Rosenhan?" he finally asks.
"Actually, not so good," I say. "He's lost his wife to cancer, his daughter Nina in a car crash. He's had several strokes and is now suffering from a disease they can't quite diagnose. He's paralysed."
That Spitzer doesn't say, or much sound, sorry when he hears this reveals the depths to which Rosenhan's study is still hated in the field, even after 30 years. "That's what you get," he says, "for conducting such an inquiry."
Rosenhan's experiment, like, perhaps, any piece of good art, is prismatic, powerful and flawed. You can argue with it, as in all of the above. Nevertheless, there are, it seems to me, some essential truths in his findings. Labels do determine how we view what we view. Psychiatry is a fledgling science, if it is a science at all, because to this day it lacks firm knowledge of practically any physiological basis for mental illness, and science is based on the body, on measurable matter. Psychiatrists do jump to judgment - not all of them, but a lot of them - and they can be pompous, probably because they're insecure. In any case, Rosenhan's study did not help this insecurity. The experiment was greeted with outrage, and then, at last, a challenge. "All right," said one hospital, its institutional chest all puffed up. "You think we don't know what we're doing? Here's a dare. In the next three months, send as many pseudopatients as you like to our emergency room and we'll detect them. Go ahead."The unpleasant Spitzer also said, ""that experiment could never be successfully repeated. Not in this day and age."Now, Rosenhan liked a fight. So he said, "Sure." He said in the next three months he would send an undisclosed number of pseudopatients to this particular hospital, and the staff were to judge, in a sort of experimental reversal, not who was insane, but who was sane. One month passed. Two months passed. At the end of three months, the hospital staff reported to Rosenhan that they had detected, with a high degree of confidence, 41 of Rosenhan's pseudopatients. Rosenhan had, in fact, sent none. Case closed. Match over. Psychiatry hung its head.
Since Rosenhan, psychiatry has tried admirably to locate the physiological origins of mental disease - mostly in vain. Much of the current research is a knowing or unknowing response to Rosenhan's challenge and to the inherent anxieties it raises in "soft" scientists.
So Lauren Slater did it again -- now:
It's a little fun, going into ERs and playing this game, so over the next eight days I do it eight more times, nearly the number of admissions Rosenhan arranged. Each time, I am denied admission, but, strangely enough, most times I am given a diagnosis of depression with psychotic features, even though, I am now sure, after a thorough self-inventory and the solicited opinions of my friends and my physician brother, I am really not depressed. (As an aside, but an important one, a psychotic depression is never mild; in the DSM, it is listed in the severe category, accompanied by gross and unmistakable motor and intellectual impairments.)Spitzer's reaction to Slater's repeat of the experiment is instructive:I am prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants. At no point does an interview last longer than 12 and a half minutes, although at most places I needed to wait an average of two and a half hours in the waiting room. No one ever asks me, beyond a cursory religious-orientation question, about my cultural background; no one asks me if the voice is of the same gender as I; no one gives me a full mental status exam, which includes more detailed and easily administered tests to indicate the gross disorganisation of thinking that almost always accompanies psychosis. Everyone, however, takes my pulse.
"OK," I say. "Let me tell you, I tried this experiment. I actually did it."Some things are certainly much better today: as Slater reports, and in great contrast to Rosenhan's findings, "every single medical professional was nice" to her. One wouldn't think that would need to be noted as a great improvement, but compared to 30 years ago, it does."You?" he says, and pauses. "You're kidding me." I wonder if I hear defensiveness edging into his voice. "And what happened?" he says.
I tell him. I tell him I was not given a deferred diagnosis ["a special category that allows clinicians to do just that, officially put off a diagnosis due to lack of information"], but almost every time I was given a diagnosis of psychotic depression plus a pouch of pills.
"What kind of pills?" he asks.
"Antidepressants, antipsychotics."
"What kind of antipsychotics?" he asks.
"Risperdal," I say.
"Well," Spitzer says - and I picture him tapping his pen against the side of his skull - "that's a very light antipsychotic, you know?"
"Light?" I say. "The pharmacological rendition of low-fat?"
"You have an attitude," he tells me, "like Rosenhan did. You went in with a bias and you found what you were looking for."
"I went in," I say, "with a thud, and from that one word a whole schema was woven and pills were given, despite the fact that no one really knows how or why the pills work or really what their safety is."
Spitzer clears his throat. "I'm disappointed," he says, and I think I hear real defeat, the slumping of shoulders, the pen put down. "I think," he says slowly, and there is a raw honesty in his voice now, "I think doctors just don't like to say, 'I don't know'."
"That's true," I say, "and I also think the zeal to prescribe drives diagnosis in our day, much like the zeal to pathologise drove diagnosis in Rosenhan's day, but, either way, it does seem to be more a product of fashion, or fad."
I am thinking this: in the 1970s, American doctors diagnosed schizophrenia in their patients many times more than British doctors did. And now, in the 21st century, diagnoses of depression have risen dramatically, as have those of post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It appears, therefore, that not only do the incidences of certain diagnoses rise and fall depending on public perception, but also the doctors who are giving these labels are still doing so with perhaps too little regard for the DSM criteria the field dictates.
I have much more to say about this subject, and I hope to get to some of it soon. But for now, I recommend you read Slater's article, which provides many more details -- and think about its implications. And remember that psychiatry is a "fledgling science, if it is a science at all." Any purported "science" which "lacks firm knowledge of practically any physiological basis for mental illness" is, of necessity, all too likely to be "a product of fashion, or fad."
And, as I have done before, I recommend you visit Thomas Szasz's site, for a great deal of additional information on this important subject.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
Trade and Terror
The last two pieces I've written for FoxNews.com have been pretty critical of President Bush, and as you might expect from a Fox audience, email responses were overwhelmingly negative, though not very convincing. Even the suppportive responses were along the lines of "I agree that spending is out of control, but Bush doesn't play politics with national security, and that's why I'm voting for him."
I'm not so sure that's the case. And The New Republic's Jonathan Chait reminds me why. In a recent policy forum televised by C-SPAN, Chait points out that not long after September 11, just after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged his support for our anti-terrorism efforts, he asked President Bush for a small favor in return. Musharraf asked that Bush lift U.S. tariffs on textiles coming from Pakistan. This, Musharraf said, would give him something to take back to the people of Pakistan. He could argue that in exchange for Pakistani support, Pakistanis might enjoy a better standard of living through access to U.S. markets.
But Bush said no, mainly to placate House Republicans from North and South Carolina. Musharaff has faced nothing but turmoil -- including multiple attempts on his life -- in the time since.
It would be foolish to suggest that had Bush lifted the tariffs, all would be hunky-dorey in Pakistan. But things certainly wouldn't be worse. And there's really no other way to look at the decision to hold the tariffs than as a political one -- in this case, to preserve a few southern congressional districts at the expense of an extremely important ally, one who stuck his neck out for us.
Or, you might say, at the expense of national security. Remember, if Musharaff goes down, militant Islam in all likelihood gets hold of its first nuclear arsenal.
It gets all the more frustrating when you consider that as a self-described "free trade president," lifting tariffs is something that ought to be on Bush's to-do list, anyway.
JAPAN'S CAREFULLY CONSTRUCTED IMAGE
Recently, a colleague tried to obtain footage of Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi entering the Yakusuni Shrine in Tokyo. He was refused.
Yakusuni Shrine, for those who don't know, is the place where the spirits of Japanese war dead are enshrined and worshipped as gods. Tojo Hikeki, who, as Japan's war-time prime minister, ordered the attack on Pearl Habor, is one of the spirits installed at Yakusuni.
Since the war, Yakasuni has been the center of Japan's growing nationalist resurgency. Until the 1980's, no Prime Minister visited the Shrine officially, since doing so would enrage the anti-war elements of Japanese society and damage relations abroad, especially with Asian countries like China that has suffered at the hands of Japanese invaders.
All of that has since changed, and now, Japanese ministers and members of government routinely visit the Shrine. On August 15, the date of the Japanse surrender in 1945, even the Prime Minister visits and pays homage. Thus the question: can video footage of the current Prime Minister visiting the Shrine on August 15 be obtained?
Apparently not. The government-ownded TV station, NHK, refuses to provide it, calling it "too sensitive." We can understand why. Over the years, Japan has carefully cultivated an image of itself as a modern and peaceful democracy. What would the world say if people could see Koizumi marching in and out of Yakasuni where WWII kamakazi pilots are glorified?
The fault is not with NHK or the Japanese government. Their motives are obvious. But how is that the United States remains in the dark about resurgent Japanese nationalism? For the answer, I highly recommend Ivan Hall's recent book, "Bamboozled!"
The Two Things Rule
I'm sure the sharp minds here might have a few contributions to the list.
ON GRAVE AND GATHERING THREATS
For days now, the news has been dominated by reactions to David Kay's statement that "we were almost all wrong" in the belief that Iraq had WMDs. Condoleeza Rice concedes that maybe there were no WMDs, but "Saddam Hussein had every opportunity ... to tell the world that he had destroyed them." Instead, he chose to remain silent and "secretive," allowing "the world to continue to wonder if he was sitting there with botulinum toxin and anthrax."
Now, I'm not about to defend the honor of a lying, murdering tyrant like Hussein. But, for months, Iraqi spokesmen and scientists were saying exactly that: that Iraq had no WMDs. Hussein himself denied their existence. Through a translator, the former Iraqi President told CBS News anchor, Dan Rather:
[T]he United States - the world - knows that there is nothing in Iraq [...] the fleets that have been brought around and the mobilization that's been done were, in fact, done partly to cover the huge lie that was being waged against Iraq about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And it was on that basis that Iraq actually accepted [the UN] Resolution - accepted it, even though [...] Iraqi officials ... had kept saying, that ... Iraq was empty, was void of any such weapons [...] But Iraq accepted that resolution ... in order not to allow any misinterpretation of its position.
Hussein also denied any linkage to Osama Bin Laden, and maintained again and again that "Iraq has not produced any such weapons [of mass destruction]."
Since UN inspectors were already in Iraq, and Iraq was submitting to an extended inspection process, and the US had surrounded that country with its military forces, where was this "grave and gathering threat to America and the world" that President Bush keeps talking about?
In the meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson reiterates the pro-war case as if no stubborn facts have impinged on that case one iota. "Success in Iraq cannot be measured by how much it resembles the Connecticut countryside next month," says Hanson, "but instead by whether — in two or three years — it is a country that no longer invades others, promotes terrorists, kills its own citizens, and uses petrol dollars to acquire a strategic arsenal to threaten the West."
This is nice, as far as it goes. If the US stays in Iraq, it's true: Iraq won't be invading its neighbors (it might have to leave that job to the US military) — or using its petrol dollars to threaten the West. But it will remain a fertile ground for the growth of the very terrorism the US seeks to fight.
Hanson continues:
For all the rhetoric about American corporate profiteering — the "Afghanistan pipeline," the Halliburton bonanza, the carving up of the Iraqi petroleum pie — the ultimate cost of restoring the two countries [Iraq and Afghanistan] will be enormous, yet justifiable not in economic advantages, but in both national-security interests and, yes, moral terms. This is as it should be, since we Americans recently have had a prior relationship with both the Afghan and Iraqi nations. Unlike the British or Russians, we have never attempted to colonize them, but we are nevertheless obligated to set things right since, at critical times when we had the ability to offer aid, we chose isolationism and retreat — and thousands died as a consequence.
Isolationism and retreat? Just because the US hasn't engaged in traditional colonization does not mean that it has engaged in "isolationism and retreat" in the Middle East. The neocorporatist reality is that the US spent years propping up the Shahs, the Husseins, the Afghani mujahideen, the House of Sa'ud; it has spent years ... decades ... funneling "foreign aid" — in the form of money and munitions — to these despotic forces, while also socializing the risks of oil companies that received monopoly concessions from various host governments. Indeed, US support of ARAMCO and the House of Sa'ud created a financial dynamic that has nourished the export of Wahhabi fanaticism to the rest of the Islamic world. It is not US "isolationism and retreat" that is to blame here. It is US interventionist policy in the Middle East that has been one of the most important contributing factors to the development of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Hanson decries, justifiably, "scores of mistakes" made by the US in Iraq, but this does not stop him from seeing this war as "one of the brightest moments in recent American history." On this basis, he condemns the antiwar movement as if it is constituted only by the "ossified Left."
Another case against this war has been made by principled libertarians and a few conservatives too. Such individuals have been as opposed to the "ossified Left" as to the neocons who brought us this mess.
Hanson favors nation building (calling it, instead, "nation rebuilding"). But he makes a good point against the "quest for utopian perfection," that is, "the idea that a few modern-day Jeffersons and Madisons need be present to craft a suitable constitution" for Iraq.
The truth is: I'd settle for a few American Jeffersons and Madisons in the United States! Ultimately, it will take that kind of radical cultural and political shift to save Americans from the grave and gathering threats to life and liberty — at home and abroad.
Friday, January 30, 2004
BIOGRAPHIES
Not only am I an avid reader of obituaries but I am also a keen reader of biographies and entries in biographical dictionaries, preferably those written after the death of the subject and with full access to their papers, etc. Some of my favorite books are biographical dictionaries, either national or more specific. The notable Dictionary of National Biography, first edited by Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Wolfe, remains an amazing repository of human knowledge. Many decades ago Oxford University Press took over its publication and every so often issued a new volume with entries on the relatively recently deceased. In 1991 OUP decided to commission a very largely new text. This September the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will be published simultaneously in sixty print volumes and electronically. The editorial policy is to include everyone who was in the old DNB together with many people who had been omitted, including George Washington (after all he was once a British citizen), and the recently deceased with a cut-off date of December 31, 2000. Among those included are such legendary characters as Robin Hood and families and groups, such as the Cecil family--read about Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, here--or the Tolpuddle Martyrs here.
The policy of including everyone who was in the old DNB is in welcome contrast to that followed by OUP in New York when in 1999 it published the American Dictionary of Biography under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies as a replacement for the Dictionary of American Biography. The editors chose to exclude a good many people whom they deemed were no longer important enough to be included. Such was the fate of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939), and other principled individualists and many more not-so-principled politicians who were swept aside to make room for a host of newcomers, including a great many women and minorities, some of whom certainly deserved to be included for their contributions to American life and some of whom may eventually be discarded when a new edition is commissioned and the particular sort of political correctness that currently rules academia is no longer fashionable.
All of you who are interested in intellectual dissent should search out Joseph McCabe's A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920/1998). There you can read fascinating entries on the freethinking views of celebrated and not-so-celebrated men and women and refutations of those alleged deathbed conversions with which priests would harangue their congregations. McCabe (1867-1955) was a former Jesuit who renounced his faith to become a leading propagandist for secularism. Perhaps his most celebrated book is Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897, 2nd edition 1903). As you might imagine, his intellectual conversion didn't make his fortune but rather led to his penury. But it also led him to write hundreds of books and pamphlets on every subject, including numerous Little Blue Books published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), a journalist and publisher in Girard, Kansas, and a celebrated translation of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)'s The Riddle of the Universe (1900).
Having mentioned Joseph McCabe, I should now make reference to John Mackinnon Robertson (1856-1933), a self-educated scholar, whose books A History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern, to the Period of the French Revolution, 4th ed. (1936) and A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929) remain unsurpassed for their comprehensive and erudite coverage of courageous individuals and their writings. Counterpunch.com is the one left-wing website that I visit almost every day. There's usually an article or two worth reading, sometimes several, and it's always fun to read Alexander Cockburn's ironic remarks which he posts at least once a week. Each day new articles come online some time after 9 AM Pacific time. It's a pretty eclectic mixture, with articles by Ron Paul and William Lind appearing alongside (far more numerous) anarchists, socialists and Marxists. And Reason's Jesse Walker has made an occasional appearance in the past.
Today Counterpunch carries an article by Sam Husseini--Same Skeletons, Different Closet: How Many People Will Die Because of This "Mistake", Senator Kerry?--which conveniently lists a great many questions that David Beito can ask of John Kerry.
Good luck, David, in your efforts to reveal the real John Kerry. Well....not really, at least not yet. I have reason to believe that I might be able to meet with him, probably in a group setting. If I get a chance to ask him questions, what should they be? I think it is best to keep away from personal issues (such where were you on the afternoon on July 8, 1971? etc.). Suggestions please! I felt like I was in some kind of weird alternative universe a la Star Trek this morning as I read my local paper the Indianapolis Star. Just below an AP story describing how President Bush is now proposing INCREASING funding for the NEA (oh if I had the time to blog about that one today) were two pieces on the new government estimates for what the Bush prescription drug benefit is really going to cost.
OK, no one really believed the benefit was going to cost a mere 400 billion dollars, but the sort of stunning indifference to the gross understatement of cost by the White House from veteran politicians, such as Indiana's senior Senator Richard Lugar, in this report on the bill's true cost made me wonder what exactly conservatives stand for these days. Lugar describes early estimates of a government program's cost as "notoriously unreliable." Why not just say "always waaaaaaaay low?" A billion here for bad art, a billion for the drug companies.......
So we know the right has completely sold out, but what of the left who complained that this bill didn't do enough to help out America's poor helpless seniors? This argument has to be one of the most frustrating for me as a political scientist. The data on this point are crystal clear. Even if you believe that government transfers to eliminate problems are the way to go (and I do not) this additional plum to seniors is over the top.
Since the implementation of social security during the New Deal there's no doubt that the poverty rate among seniors has declined, although it's an open question whether or not government transfers or overall wealth creation are the cause of this. However one little fact ignored by everyone is that poverty among children has not shrunk. In fact there are now almost four times as many children below the poverty line in this country as there are seniors. If liberals really believe that we need to spend this money to help people, then why not give it America's 12 million children in poverty? Could it be that seniors vote at slightly higher rates then grammar school students?
Conservatives are engaging in naked political manipulation to try to win the votes of senior citizens by continuing to lavish pork on them. Liberals are either in denial if they believe these programs need to pay them even more or fighting a losing battle with conservatives to court votes in an election. I'll let you pick which one you think is correct. Last night, Ted Koppel's "Nightline," which was born in the days of the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter administration, presented an extraordinary look inside Iran. The country is basically fractured in two. Real political power is held by 12 appointed clerics and jurists, the "Guardian Council," which exercises "rigid Islamic control" and which recently disqualified most of the reformers among the candidates running for parliamentary election next month because they are "insufficiently loyal to Islam."
And yet, says Koppel, "millions upon millions of very young people thirsting for Western music, movies, and a hip lifestyle" are becoming a cultural force to be reckoned with. Even as genders are separated in public spaces and women remain covered, pro-reform forces are making dramatic strides. Having won the Presidency in 1997 and a Parliamentary majority in 2000, the reformists are giving political expression to a rising cultural rebellion against fundamentalism. It's precisely the kind of dynamic to which I referred in my post on "Hussein, Bin Laden, and Gramsci": an evolving "bloc of historical forces," as Antonio Gramsci would have called it, that is slowly sweeping away the conditions upon which political oppression depends.
On the streets, young women wear make-up, and keep pushing their veils further back off their faces. Teens are listening to Western pop music and attending spontaneous Rave parties. Home-grown heavy metal groups sometimes play concerts.
The raw statistics are ominous for the ruling class. Whereas 7 years ago, women constituted only 40% of the student population, today they constitute 64%. Their more liberal attitudes are the embodiment of a fledgling feminism. An astounding 70% of the population is under 35 and "the expectations of [this] younger generation are very high," says Presidential spokesman Abdollah Zadeh. The students, many of them from Tehran University, continue to organize pro-democracy demonstrations, while the political reformists hope to hold on to their majority and move toward a detente with the US.
And yet, fewer than a third of Iranians plan to vote in next month's sham of an election. There is no political freedom: "You speak, you go to jail," says one woman. "Since 1999," reports correspondent Jim Sciutto, "200 pro-reform newspapers have been shut down," while thousands of political prisoners have been locked into Iranian jails.
Given the strength of state police powers, says Jonathan Lyons from Reuters, it will probably take several generations of slow reform for pro-democracy forces to win out.
While it is true that cultural change evolves at a slower relative pace than political change, it is also true that cultural change of this magnitude can make political change superfluous.
What should the US do in response? Nothing. Let freedom take its course. Indeed, if there were this kind of cultural movement inside Iraq, I would be much more confident about "nation-building" in that country — a country splintered by Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi'ite tribalism.
Here is the key difference between Iran and Iraq: A nation of freedom beckons in Iran; it is fomenting from within, rather than being imposed from without, as if from an Archimedean standpoint. The Iranian clerics condemn this movement as "decadence." All the more reason to be In Praise of Decadence, as author Jeff Riggenbach would say. For decadence, in this context, signifies the decay of authority, the decay of the traditional. The Iranian students are staging a countercultural revolution; they are calling for political freedom, the rollback of clerical control, and the assertion of procedural democracy. It is too early to tell whether this counterculture will evolve into an authentically libertarian movement; but it is a blast of freedom that might very well topple the suffocating power of the fundamentalist state. It is the kind of radical change — change that goes to the "root" — that frightens Islamicists far more than the presence of a US occupying force in neighboring Iraq. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to Liberty and Power, for while I have posted to online forums and left a few comments on other people's blogs, I’ve yet to establish one of my own. I am an academic psychologist. A quick description of my research interests would be that I do theoretical psychology, with a developmental bias; I am also becoming gradually more interested in the history of psychology. My hobby is music history (jazz and R&B, in particular). Though I've been a libertarian for a long time, which of course means that I harbor too many opinions on too many subjects, I don't claim any special insight into most of them. What I propose to concentrate on is academic life. Universities are, to a large extent, non-market institutions--even in the United States, where they are less insulated from market forces than is usually the case elsewhere. What's more, their non-market status is nearly always taken for granted: by insiders and outsiders, by supporters and critics alike. I believe that understanding how universities work will enable us to understand why they often exert such illiberal influences on society at large, and put us in a better position to evaluate proposals for transforming them. In fact, universities are now under multiple pressures that come close to guaranteeing that they won't keep functioning as they did in the past. So I hope to add to the informed critiques of academia that David Beito and R. Reid McKee, in particular, have been contributing to this blog. According to this exclusive ABC News report, it appears that oil contracts were awarded to quite a few individuals by the regime of Saddam Hussein from 1997 until 2003, "conducted under the aegis of the United Nations' oil-for-food program, which was designed to allow Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods." A document found among the files of the Iraqi Oil Ministry in Baghdad lists around "270 prominent individuals, political parties or corporations in 47 countries [that were] given Iraq oil contracts instantly worth millions of dollars," constituting what financial investigator John Fawcett has called "a political slush fund that was buying political support for the regime of Saddam Hussein for the last six or seven years."
The ABC report states: "Investigators say none of the people involved would have actually taken possession of oil, but rather just the right to buy the oil at a discounted price, which could be resold to a legitimate broker or oil company, at an average profit of about 50 cents a barrel." Among the prominent individuals named in the files were opponents of the US policy in Iraq:
- Indonesia President Megawati Sukarnoputri, "who received a contract for 10 million barrels of oil — about a $5 million profit."
- The son of the Syrian defense minister received 6 million barrels, worth about $3 million.
- George Galloway, a British member of Parliament, slated to receive 19 million barrels of oil, a $90.5 million profit.
- France, which was "the second-largest beneficiary" of these oil contracts, "with tens of millions of barrels awarded to Patrick Maugein, a close political associate and financial backer of French President Jacques Chirac."
- "The single biggest set of contracts," reports ABC, "were given to the Russian government and Russian political figures, more than 1.3 billion barrels in all — including 92 million barrels to individual officials in the office of President Vladimir Putin. Another 1 million barrels were contracted to the Russian ambassador to Baghdad, 137 million barrels of oil were given to the Russian Communist Party, and 5 million barrels were contracted to the Russian Orthodox Church."
Let's put all of this in perspective. There is nothing new about the intersection of pecuniary and political interests. So, it is no surprise to find French, Russian, and Syrian interests, who opposed the US campaign in Iraq, to be in bed with the Hussein regime — just the way the US slept with Hussein back in the 1980s, and the way the US sleeps with the Saudis today. It is amusing, however, when the US cries "foul" over these transactions, reducing all foreign government policies to the cash nexus. After all, the cash nexus never influences US foreign policy. Never. Yesterday BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies resigned following publication of the Hutton report. Then today the Director General, Greg Dyke, resigned. Gavin Hewitt, a BBC reporter, spoke of "one of the most turbulent days in the BBC's history" and that wasn't an overstatement. Ominously the BBC
reports that "The departure of both the BBC chairman and director general comes amid growing calls for the BBC to come under outside regulation. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said the Hutton report would be taken into account in the 2006 review of the BBC's charter." Currently, the BBC enjoys a certain degree of independence from the government although, of course, since it is largely funded by a mandatory TV license fee, a tax by any other name, it is, of course, very much dependent on the state for its existence. In practice this means that the BBC investigates and reports on government wrong-doing and frequently hosts interviews and debates critical of the current administration on one topic or another. The prevailing ethos is center-left but that doesn't prevent BBC commentators and guests making thoughtful criticisms of the government from time to time. Tom Palmer's accusation that "The BBC Does Its Best to Destroy Universal Values" is very wide of the mark. I fear that, in response to the Hutton report, even the BBC's mild criticisms of government policies will be tempered for fear of recriminations. That is why real liberals want to see a truly independent BBC financed voluntarily through market mechanisms and by the donations of viewers and listeners.
There is wide agreement that the Hutton report whitewashed Blair and his cronies. At The Independent Andrew Grice reports the words of Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who says: "It is a whitewash, basically. The danger is that it is so one-sided a report that it is going to lose credibility. People just aren't going to believe it." And over at the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator, writes:
"Blair, Hoon, Scarlett, the whole lot of them, have been sprayed with more whitewash than a Costa Brava timeshare. Hutton has succumbed to blindness of Nelsonian proportions. As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas.
"With unerring inaccuracy, he has trained his guns at exactly the wrong target. He has blasted the BBC when, as I will repeat to my dying day, it was Blair, Campbell and Hoon who were the guilty men.
"How, you may be asking, do I dare to dissent from the opinions of the judge? I dissent because I have read the evidence presented to Hutton, and I put it to you that the judge is noble, learned and talking through the back of his neck." For those of us political junkies in the world this is a special time of the year. It's sort of like pennant fever for baseball fans as we watch the presidential campaign unfold before us (with understandable terror at the chosen policies of Democratic and Republican candidates for libertarians).
However media pundits, the same folks who told us that Dean was only a few inconvenient elections away from being the nominee, are now saying that it's already a two person race. Gregg Easterbrook's blog in the New Republic on line is typical of what I've been reading and hearing in the post-New Hampshire press.
Not so fast. A few things to remember. First, this is a Democratic party highly fractured and angry that Bush is essentially a Republican Clinton without the telegenic speeches. Some of them want to vent their spleens by voting for Howard Dean regardless of whether or not he can win. They aren't going to go away, and if Dean's scream meant anything other than the viable end to his campaign it also meant that he had no sane intention of dropping out.
Second, more then a few Democratic voters may have pause when it comes to deciding John Kerry is all that electable. So he's a war hero SO WAS GEORGE MCGOVERN! My how the Democrats have short memories. Here's an interesting site pushing Kerry's candidacy because he's "Overall the most progressive candidate we have running." The author basically uses some of the widely available scores assigned by various interest groups to place members of Congress on an ideological scale. Note that despite the popular conception that Kucinich is the left wing nut in this race, Kerry out-liberals all the candidates in most categories including the all important animal rights category
Should Democrats be worried about running John Kerry against George Bush? Yep. Should libertarians be worried about choosing between Bush and Kerry. Ugh. David Beito’s post and Radley Balko’s Foxnews.com column remind me of something big-government right-winger George Will wrote in the 1980s. He chided conservatives for saying that the government cannot competently set minimum wages or provide health care, because if people come to believe that, how will they be persuaded that the government can effect regime change in other countries? (He had Cuba in mind back then.) This constitutes a case for conservative totalitarianism.
The news media continue their unrelenting propaganda on behalf of the “democratic process.” In reporting the results of the New Hampshire primary, one cable TV news reader noted that Wesley Clark had beaten John Edwards for third place by about 800 votes, demonstrating once again, he said, that “every vote counts.” And exactly how does it demonstrate that? All it tells me is that any person in New Hampshire who cast more than 800 votes that night might have made a difference in who placed third. "NASA-Northwest" were awarded the prize for Privacy Villain of the Week back in August 22, 2002. (The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. The discrepancy is the frequency is undoubtedly because there are currently more villains than heroes.) I guess you just can't keep a good villain down! Because "NASA-Northwest redux" is Villain of the Week for January 23, 2004! The press release reads:
"After two years, the public has finally learned that Northwest Airlines did indeed give the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sensitive consumer data for use in a bizarre research program that combined data-mining and "brain-monitoring" technology. There was a more naive time when it seemed the 21st-century total federal takeover of airport security would merely involve swarms of overpaid, un-fireable federal employees harassing hapless harried travelers with interminable baggage and body searches. But the dangers of "mind-reading" technology didn't occur to even the most strident skeptic. Or did it? Maybe we need to ask NASA.
It was revealed back in 2002 that scientists from NASA asked Northwest Airlines for "system-wide Northwest Airlines passenger data from July, August, and September 2001." The data was to be used in the still-mysterious program the federal space agency was working on with a commercial firm -- the idea was to use both data-mining and "brain-monitoring" technology installed at airport terminals to somehow identify "threats." The proposed brain-monitoring technology would detect EEG and ECG signals from the brain and heart and then have that data analyzed by software, in combination with previously-floated plans to cross-reference passengers' travel history, credit history, and other information from hundreds or even thousands of databases as part of the Computer-Aided Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) program.
In a press release, Robert Pearce, the Director of NASA's Strategy and Analysis Division, disavowed the report, assuring the populace that "NASA does not have the capability to read minds, nor are we suggesting that would be done." Yet another NASA spokesman, Herb Schlickenmaier, confirmed that reading the brainwaves and heart rates of airline passengers was a goal of NASA's -- the thinking being that such data combined with body temperature and eye-flicker rate could make a sort of super-lie detector. However, the PowerPoint presentation delivered by NASA to Northwest in December, said NASA has "Non-invasive neuro-electric sensors under development as a collaborative venture between NASA Ames and commercial partner." This contradicts the NASA statement that "We have not approved any research in this area." If this is how NASA assembles policy, it's little wonder their hardware assembly has a dismal track record.
Does the tweezer brigade really need Please visit McBlog
There is an important distortion and a significant piece of misdirection that is now occurring with regard to David Kay's recent statements and the purported "intelligence failures" about Iraq's non-existent WMD threat. This editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune captures the issue very accurately:
The large question is why American and British intelligence didn't know these things. Kay says it was because intelligence officials grew complacent during the years of U.N. weapons inspections. They could evaluate a satellite image, then ask inspectors to check out anything suspicious. But when the inspectors left in 1998, there were few indigenous sources to fill the gap.
That sounds plausible, but there is more to the story. The Clinton administration was getting the same intelligence, yet it, reasonably, did not head off to the United Nations to warn that Iraq needed to be invaded yesterday. It wanted to take out Osama bin Laden; Saddam was a secondary concern.
That suggests someone in the Bush administration made an early decision to put the most dangerous possible spin on what Iraq intelligence was available. Information that was tentative became certain; equipment that might have numerous uses became certified WMD material; rumors became fact.
Recall what was happening at the U.N. Security Council prior to the war. France, Russia and Germany weren't denying that Saddam might pose a risk; they disputed that the risk was imminent; they disputed that war -- especially immediate war -- was the only alternative.
The Bush administration was having none of it; Saddam had 12 years to comply with U.N. demands and had not; years of inspections had failed. Iraq needed to be invaded.
Adopting that unyielding line was a political decision, not an intelligence judgment. It came from the neoconservatives in the administration and was pushed most actively by Vice President Dick Cheney.
He's still at it. ...
What the American people are hearing from Cheney now is just what the world heard from other prominent administration officials before the war. It's all wrong, and Cheney's responsibility for that can't be neatly off-loaded onto intelligence agency scapegoats. Though he could bring out the major issues, Fulbright was a teacher, not a leader, unready himself to put his vote where it counted. When a month after the hearings the Senate authorized $4.8 billion in emergency funds for the war in Vietnam, the bill passed against only the two faithful negatives of Morse and Gruening. Fulbright voted with the majority.
The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, "We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against." This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. "Foreign policy decisions," concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, "are in general much more influenced by irrational motives" than are domestic ones. But this tactic serves an important purpose: it passes blame off to another party, and in effect lets the administration off the hook. The administration thus hopes to insulate itself from examination, criticism and accountability. It's as if the administration is saying: "The intelligence made us do it."
But the intelligence, whatever it was, didn't make them do anything. They had already decided what they wanted to do -- and the intelligence was almost irrelevant.
Remember Tuchman's warning -- and hold the Bush Administration fully accountable. The intelligence didn't matter in the end, they knew what they wanted to do, and they did it -- with a great deal of enthusiastic support. Hold them all responsible for the consequences, whatever they may be.
And keep Tuchman's words in mind, the next time the war whoops begin to rise. And at some point they will: it's only a question of time, and which country will be the next target.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Please forgive me for presuming to write to you about a matter of weighty religious significance, when religion is not a subject I consider myself at all expert in. In addition, this particular matter involves complex historical conflicts, as well as a long history of horrifically destructive discrimination and mass murder, subjects I am certain you are both all too familiar with, especially after the debate that has gone on for many months now.
And I myself would not want to be the person to bring you perhaps unwelcome news, especially when you have entrusted this subject to people with motives undoubtedly purer and nobler than mine, people such as one of the producers of Mr. Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ," and perhaps assorted press agents. But I am sure Mr. Gibson had his reasons for believing those individuals would bring the proper perspective to a topic of such deep and intense personal concern to millions of people across the world.
In view of Ms. Noonan's ongoing concern with the Pope's (possible) verdict about Mr. Gibson's film, I take the liberty of addressing her as well. And since I would not wish to be the bearer of bad tidings, I am especially heartened that James Shapiro has written on this subject, in the Los Angeles Times. I realize that Mr. Shapiro is not a movie producer or a press agent, but I hope you will consider his remarks in light of his not inconsiderable credentials:
Though the story line, language, motivation and even the cast of characters have changed over the years, the one constant is that every audience believes that the Passion story they are watching captures exactly what happened to Jesus.
But how does the pope, Gibson or anyone else know how "it was"? After all, our main sources for Jesus' final days are the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Writing a generation or so after the death of Jesus, the evangelists didn't witness these events, their accounts differ and they fail to provide crucial details.
Gibson has said that in making this film he was moved by the Holy Ghost and did little more than direct traffic. But like any Hollywood director confronted with four scripts of a well-known story, he had to do a lot of editing. And he had to go beyond what Scripture says. But it is this passage in Mr. Shapiro's article that I particularly wanted to draw to your attention:
The new story line dominated stage and screen Passions (one of the earliest films ever made was of this Passion) right up to, and even after, the Holocaust. It was an interpretation that Adolf Hitler singled out for praise when he attended a performance in Oberammergau, Germany, where Passion plays have been performed continuously since the 1600s. He applauded the way the Oberammergau Pilate stood out "like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry."
Then, in 1965, came Vatican II, which rewrote the Catholic Church's position on how the Passion narrative could be told. No longer could the Jews be considered Christ killers, collectively and in perpetuity. Still, change was slow. It was only in 2000, for example, that Oberammergau eliminated the blood curse from its script and showed some Jews defending Jesus. Even so, its 19th century-inflected story line remains disturbing for Jewish spectators. I hope you will read all of Mr. Shapiro's commentary. And trusting in the sincerity of your religious beliefs, and your desire not to cause unnecessary offense and dismay, I am certain you will address these issues. In fact, I would truly like to know what genuinely has been on your mind with regard to your film, Mr. Gibson, and what truly motivates both of you (and others who share your perspective) in connection with this controversy.
Oh...wait, though. On second thought, I am not at all sure that it would be an altogether pleasant experience to know what your concerns actually are in this matter. Please forget that I mentioned it.
But I do hope you will give these issues some serious consideration, and I will look for any further comments either of you might care to offer. Since true sincerity is important in matters such as these, I won't wish you great success with your film, Mr. Gibson. I wouldn't mean it. So perhaps I might phrase it this way: I hope your film has the success and enjoys the reputation that it deserves.
Well, I think that covers everything I wished to say. I am sure I will take as much pleasure in your future remarks on this subject as I have enjoyed those you have both offered in the past.
Arthur Silber
(P.S. Mr. Gibson, please permit me one additional cautionary note. I certainly hope that the matter of a screen credit for the Holy Ghost won't end up in any sort of arbitration with the Directors' Guild. That might be rather messy -- and given your adversary, I would not think you would be likely to win such a dispute. So you might want to give that matter some careful thought as well.)
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Many thanks to Radley Balko for his Fox News article citing my blog on Andrew Sullivan's biting critique of Dubya's domestic policy. I had argued, contra Sullivan, that our president's foreign and domestic policies are not contradictory but entirely consistent with a long Wilsonian tradition in American history.
For this reason, I am not too excited by the current criticisms of Bush by pro-war libertarians and conservatives at National Review Online , the Volokh Conspiracy, and other venues.
In choosing to back Dubya's war policies down-the-line, most of these critics of his domestic policy have essentially locked themselves into supporting him in November. In fact, their complaints may actually help Dubya win votes. He can point to their "all in the family" attacks to prove to moderate voters that he is, after all, a sensible conservative pragmatist who is protecting the country from extremist small government ideologues. Meanwhile, he can safely depend on the votes and public support of most these same pro-war libertarians and conservatives at election time.
The only way that Dubya will take their concerns seriously is if they bolt to a third party (or stay home) in November. I don't think that they are willing to do this when push comes to shove. Thanks to Chris Coyne, graduate student extraordinaire at George Mason's Economics
department, I give you my quote of the day: "The immense majority strives after a greater and better supply of
food, clothes, homes, and other material amenities. In calling a rise in
the masses'
standard of living progress and improvement, economists do not espouse
a mean materialism. They simply establish the fact that people are motivated
by the
urge to improve the material conditions of their existence. They judge
policies from the point of view of the aims men want to attain. He who disdains
the
fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues
may cast the first stone upon the materialism of economists." - Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 193 It never ceases to amaze me how those who defend capitalism are quickly labeled
as selfish
and cruel despite the evidence to the contrary. The difficulty in making
discussions focus on the means and not the ends is equally
frustrating. I guess it's just too easy to assume the worst intentions of those
with whom we disagree.
I'm no fan of The Undertaker (though he is reasonably pro-free enterprise for a Democrat), but it's amusing to watch the right wing slip into full attack mode now that he's the presumptive nominee. Where just weeks ago it was Howard Dean sporting horns and tail, it's now John Kerry who's a threat to democracy, morally bankrupt, poorly shaven, and regularly takes from the "give a penny, take a penny" cup, but rarely gives.
National Review is already accusing him of exploiting the Heinz Family Foundation. And over at the Intellectual Conservative, they're blaming him for Bob Kerrey's war crimes! My new FoxNews.com column is up.
It's a look at how aggressive foreign policy nearly always leads to big government domestic policy, and cites an L&P blog entry by L&P fearless leader, Dr. Beito. The statement of Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, on the Hutton report prompted me to visit their site, where I found his full statement, an
explanation of why BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan was right to pursue the story, a defense of his story, and the NUJ's threat to take "whatever action is necessary" to protect its member Gilligan if he is sacked or disciplined by the BBC in response to the Hutton report.
As you might expect, I'm not in the habit of defending the nationalized British Broadcasting Corporation but there is no doubt that it certainly does seek to maintain its independence from the government of the day, be that Labour or Conservative, that it has played a creditable part in investigating the truth behind the decision to go to war, and that it does not deserve the sort of vendetta that some commentators are now waging. It's been fun this week to watch the Bush administration handle David Kay's painfully blunt assessment of the WMD situation in Iraq. While Dick Cheney continues to flatly deny reality in front of conservative groups, Powell and Bush have been trying to have it both ways in the mainstream press by simply arguing that the intelligence suggested WMD was a problem without flatly denying the weapons don't exist.
All this silliness hit new heights at a news conference with Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski yesterday in which Mr. Bush tried to be Clintonesque in his language on the matter. This New York Times article discusses the exchange Bush had with reporters.
For lovers of liberty the matter gets even funnier/worse at the end of the piece in which the Polish president basically lectures Bush on the future of travel restrictions, something with which citizens of Eastern Europe are far too familiar. How limiting immigration from Eastern Europe helps us with the war on terror is a good question the president should have answered. Although, of course, Tony Blair must be pretty happy with the Hutton report, which lets him off the hook, many commentators and politicians are skeptical of its findings. Check
this link to read the reactions of politicians and commentators,
this link to read what Fleet Street said, and
this link where you can scroll down to read what Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, had to say about Hutton's criticism of BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. "I have spoken to Andrew Gilligan today and I believe the report does him and his story a grave injustice. Whatever Lord Hutton may think, it is clear from the evidence he heard that the dossier was 'sexed up', that many in the intelligence services were unhappy about it, and that Andrew Gilligan's story was substantially correct." [Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
I don't know how many readers follow events in the UK and in particular the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly. Today saw the publication of his report (although readers of The Sun newspaper were able to read a leaked summary of its findings over breakfast this morning). For news and comment visit the newspaper websites to which I linked in my previous post and also
BBC News and
ITV News online.
STATE JUDGE BACKS GOVERNMENT: WELL I NEVER!
"In the end what it comes down to is a judgement by Lord Hutton - who he believes, whose motives he trusts most and in that, again and again, he comes down on the side of politicians and officials, who by and large he believes and whose story, whose narrative he accepts and he comes down against Andrew Gilligan, and journalism, I have to say generally, and against the BBC."
-- Andrew Marr, BBC political editor
For Marr's full comment click on
this link. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is gearing up for a fight with the White House as it tries to complete its investigation into the nightmare of 9/11. I think it's pretty clear that the White House wants this investigation finished so that it does not have to suffer any embarrassments in an Election Year.
Yesterday, on a day of public hearings, the Commission released a tape of a conversation between flight attendant Betty Ann Ong and Nydia Gonzalez, who took the call from the American Airlines operations center. It was the first time the public had heard any recording of the chaos on American Airlines Flight 11.
Twenty-three minutes before the plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Ong relayed a report of the carnage on board: the first-class galley attendant, stabbed; the purser, stabbed; the passengers forced to the back of the plane, unable to breathe because of some kind of pepper spray or mace; the terrorists locked in the cockpit with the pilots.
Ong was calm enough to identify the first-class seats in which the terrorists were sitting. "I think we're getting hijacked," she said. Somebody, she said, was trying to call "medical" to attend to the injured.
And then, silence.
Gonzalez asked: "What's going on, Betty? Betty, talk to me. ... Are you there? Betty?" Turning to security, Gonzalez wondered: "Do you think we lost her?"
Betty Ann Ong was just one individual lost on that day. One among nearly 2,800 individuals.
Because the unthinkable had happened.
I didn't know Betty Ann Ong, but, as a life-long New Yorker ... a life-long Brooklynite ... I knew a lot of people who were murdered on that day. I have precious memories too of the Twin Towers. And I've reflected on that infamous day several times over the last 28 months: first on "the day after", before I could even ascertain the full safety of everybody I knew who was in and around the WTC; and then, a year later.
There is nothing more important than understanding how this horror could have happened, and how to prevent it from happening again. There is nothing more important than understanding too the broader context that has given birth to such fanatical terrorism. And there is nothing more important than uprooting the actual Al Qaeda terrorist network responsible for this murderous attack upon American civilians.
And that's why I remain so indignant over this business with Iraq. Because it's a diversion from the central tasks at hand. Because it has virtually no relationship to the events of September 11th. Because it involves the United States in a Wilsonian project of nation-building that even George W. Bush once ridiculed.
President Bush: Let the commission finish its job. I've already talked about "Al Sharpton, Comedian." Now, as we await the results of the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the New York Daily News publishes a piece on The Tao of Rev. Al. His political ideology might make you cringe, but at least the guy retains a sense of humor.
Meanwhile, as the voting ends in New Hampshire, and the voting begins for the Oscars, don't forget to cast your vote in another very important election! Liberty & Power's own Arthur Silber has been nominated for the 2003 Koufax Award for Best Non-Liberal Blog (the "Drysdale"). Here's some information on the election. Vote Now! Many others have made this point, but it's worth making any number of times: the central problem in combatting genuine terrorist threats to us does not lie in the fact that the government does not have enough power. No, the real problem lies in the fact that the government was, and appears to continue to be, remarkably incompetent and inept in using the power it already has -- and the power it had long before 9/11.
Here are two stories from today alone that demonstrate this point yet again, in considerable detail. First, here is an LA Times story on some of the failures leading to 9/11:
And as many as eight of the hijackers entered the country with doctored passports that contained "clues to their association with Al Qaeda" that should have been caught by immigration authorities, commission investigators said.
The newly disclosed findings challenge previous claims by top CIA and FBI officials that the hijackers' records and paperwork were so clean that they could not have aroused suspicion.
The commission also heard testimony from a U.S. customs agent who blocked the entry of a Saudi citizen investigators now believe may have been the intended 20th hijacker.
Authorities later learned that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Al Qaeda cells that executed the Sept. 11 attacks, was at an Orlando, Fla., airport that same day — possibly waiting to meet up with the Saudi man, Mohammed Al-Qahtani, who is now in U.S.custody.
The disclosures were included in the first set of staff reports to be issued by the commission since it opened its inquiry last year, and came during a daylong hearing devoted to immigration and intelligence-related failures by government agencies.
Government witnesses described on Monday reforms that they said have shored up serious shortcomings in border security systems, visa screenings and information-sharing among agencies responsible for generating watch lists of suspected terrorists.
But commissioners and investigators on the panel voiced concern that certain agencies have not come to grips with the magnitude of the problems that allowed Al Qaeda operatives to slip past security systems and checks.
"We are not sure that these problems have been addressed," said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission, referring to failures to put Al Qaeda operatives on federal watch lists. "We are not sure they are even adequately acknowledged as a problem." ...
Ginsburg cited a series of other security breakdowns that had not been previously disclosed. She said investigators now believe eight hijackers entered the country on passports that had been doctored "in ways that have been associated with Al Qaeda."
She did not elaborate on those methods, citing security concerns. But she said investigators have been able to examine four of the hijackers' passports that were either recovered from crash sites or found in luggage, and that digital copies of other passports were recovered in "post-9/11 operations." She challenged CIA Director George J. Tenet's description of 17 of the 19 hijackers as arriving in the country "clean" of activities or paperwork that would have aroused suspicion, and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III's claim that "each of the hijackers … came easily and lawfully from abroad."
"We believe the information we have provided today gives the commission the opportunity to reevaluate those statements," Ginsburg said. Actually, Fallows shows, many government agencies -- the Army, the CIA, and the State Department among others -- did lots of planning for postwar Iraq. But the Bush administration ignored their planning, fired planners who disagreed with it and, in several instances, barred Pentagon officials from attending meetings with planners suspected of harboring thoughts not approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
And guess what? The planners turned out to be right -- and the Bushies wrong -- about key issues such as how many troops were needed for the occupation, what dangers those troops would face and how much the whole bloody mess would cost.
Fallows -- author of several books, including "National Defense" -- won a National Magazine Award last year for an Atlantic article on Iraq. He deserves more honors for this exhaustively researched piece. But let the reader beware: Although Fallows is a sober, just-the-facts-ma'am reporter, reading this piece may leave you sputtering with rage at the arrogance and lethal folly of our leaders. But last May, shortly after the war ended, Paul Bremer, Bush's man in Iraq, ignored that advice and sent the Iraqi soldiers home. That was a "catastrophic error," Fallows writes, because "it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day."
Some of those men are using those weapons to kill Americans today. In view of this overwhelming record of failure and incompetence, one of the most amazing -- and damning -- facts with regard to the degree of seriousness brought to the "war on terror" by this administration is that, to this day, not one single person of any importance has been fired, or even severely disciplined. It's as if they think they can demonstrate monumental incompetence at literally everything, even those things that might well imperil many American lives (as well as the lives of people of other nations), and that no one will ever hold them accountable.
And they might well be right. I expect that Bush will probably be reelected in the fall, as things appear now. In that event, those Americans who do reelect him will eminently deserve whatever they get. (And I include in my judgment those additional factors I discussed here.)
Unfortunately, some of the rest of us won't deserve it, and neither will the rest of the world.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Six more American soldiers died today in Iraq yet the silence from the blogs of pro-war libertarians and conservatives continues to be deafening. Radley Balko is pessimistic about the future of individual freedom for smokers. The tobacco companies probably sealed their own fate when, despite years of consistent victories in the courts, they began to compromise back in the 1990s. Once they gave the anti-smoking nannies half a loaf, they were doomed.
Wesley Clark is probably finished as a candidate, so this might be beside the point, but Democracy Now has some startling information on his possible culpability in Kosovo civilian massacres. See, in particular, the section on the commuter train near the end. Hat tip: Jim Henley .
Looks like efforts to ban public smoking in Washington state have stalled, at least temporarily. Similar statewide bans are under consideration in Maryland, Rhode Island and Georgia.
Meanwhile, in D.C., the And they're probably right.
Last time they tried the City Council, Councilwoman Carol Schwartz bravely stared the proposed ban down, defending the property rights of D.C. business owners in the face of dubious junk science and public health claims. D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams also promised a veto.
But I wonder if that opposition will fold if 70% of D.C. residents give the ban the go-ahead, as polls seem to indicate. One of my friends sent me an e-mail, which contained some quotations. He did not provide any sources so unfortunately I cannot provide a link. However, the one below was so good I feel the need to pass it on anyways. If I had Mark Shields’ e-mail address I would certainly forward it to him.
”When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 million developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.
The Russians used a pencil.
Enjoy paying your taxes."
The Economist currently features an interesting piece on the relative superiority of higher education in the U.S. as compared to Europe.
Why are American universities superior? Is it any surprise that the answer to this question has a lot to do with competition, choice, and the degree of state control over institutions of higher learning? Here is a great new article on the real cost of America's "security" by Bob Higgs, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. He says that the actual U.S. budget for security is almost double the already whopping $400 billion that's usually cited.
"The Defense Budget Is Bigger than You Think"
When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004 on November 24, 2003, the event received considerable attention in the news media. At $401.3 billion, the public's visible cost of funding the nation's defense seemed to be reaching astronomical heights, and the president took pains to justify that enormous cost by linking it to the horrors of 9/11 and to the “war on terror.” He pledged that “we will do whatever it takes to keep our nation strong, to keep the peace, and to keep the American people secure,” clearly implying that such payoffs would accrue from the expenditures and other measures that the act authorizes.
Although the public may appreciate that $401.3 billion is a great deal of money, few citizens realize that it is only part of the total bill for defense. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as -- sometimes even more surely than -- the money allocated to the Department of Defense (DoD). On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the nuclear-weapons activities of the Department of Energy (DoE), but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.
Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. After all, the homeland is what most of us want the government to defend in the first place.
Many other agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation, also spend money in pursuit of homeland security. According to the government's budget documents (Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004, Table S-5), in fiscal year 2002, all such agencies together added approximately 50 percent to the amount spent on homeland security by the agencies later incorporated into the DHS.
Much of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. A great deal of U.S. foreign aid, currently more than $4 billion annually, takes the form of “foreign military financing,” and even funds placed under the rubric of economic development may serve defense-related purposes indirectly. Money is fungible, and the receipt of foreign assistance for economic-development projects allows allied governments to divert other funds to police, intelligence, and military purposes.
Two big budget items represent the current cost of defense goods and services obtained in the past. The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), which is authorized to spend more than $62 billion in the current fiscal year, falls into this category. Likewise, much of the government's interest expense represents the current cost of defense outlays financed in the past by borrowing.
To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I have gathered data for fiscal year 2002, the most recent fiscal year for which data on actual outlays were available at the time of this writing. In that fiscal year, the DoD itself spent $344.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the DoE budget added $18.5 billion. Agencies later to be incorporated into the DHS spent $17.5 billion, and other agencies (not including the DoD) added $8.5 billion for homeland security. The Department of State and international assistance programs spent $17.6 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The DVA had outlays of $50.9 billion. When all these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the DoD itself, they increase the total by nearly a third, to $457.4 billion.
To find out how much of the government's net interest payments on the national debt ought to be attributed to past debt-funded defense spending requires a considerable amount of calculation. I have added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year's ratio of national security spending -- military, veterans, and international affairs -- to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 81.1 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public in 2002. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government's net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending. The total amount so attributed comes to $138.7 billion.
Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $596.1 billion, which is more than 73 percent greater than DoD outlays alone.
If the additional elements of defense spending continue to maintain approximately the same ratio to the DoD amount -- and we have every reason to suppose that they will -- then in fiscal year 2004, through which we are passing currently, the grand total spent for defense will be approximately $695 billion. To this amount will have to be added the $58.8 billion allocated to fiscal year 2004 from the $87.5 billion supplemental spending authorized on November 6, 2003, for support of U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and for so-called reconstruction of those despoiled and occupied countries. Thus, the super-grand total in fiscal year 2004 will reach the astonishing amount of nearly $754 billion -- or 88 percent more than the much-publicized $401.3 billion -- plus, of course, any additional supplemental spending that may be approved before the end of the fiscal year.
Although I have arrived at my conclusions honestly and carefully, I may have left out items that should have been included -- the federal budget is a gargantuan, complex, and confusing document. If I have done so, however, the left-out items are not likely to be relatively large ones. Therefore, I propose that in considering future defense budgetary costs, a well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it. You may overstate the truth, but if so, you'll not do so by much.
Defense Outlays in Fiscal Year 2002
(billions of dollars)
Department of Defense
344.4
Department of Energy
18.5
Department of State
17.6
Department of Veterans Affairs
50.9
Agencies incorporated into Department of Homeland Security
17.5
Department of Justice (homeland security)
2.1
Department of Transportation (homeland security)
1.4
Department of the Treasury (homeland security)
0.1
National Aeronautics & Space Administration (homeland security)
0.2
Other agencies (homeland security)
4.7
Interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays
138.7
Total
596.1
Source: Author's classifications and calculations; basic data from U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004 and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. David Kay, the president’s hand-picked weapons of mass destruction snoop in Iraq, has resigned and criticized U.S. intelligence for not realizing that such Iraqi weapons programs were in disarray. He now thinks that the stocks of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed in the 1990s—out of fear that they would be discovered by U.N. weapons inspectors—and that new production was not initiated. He also believes that Iraq’s nuclear program had been restarted but was only at a very primitive stage—hardly the imminent threat alleged by the Bush administration as a justification for immediate war. So with the final nail being driven into the coffin of the administration’s main rationale for war against Iraq, Iraqi weapons programs are not the only thing in disarray.
Perhaps Kay’s findings will finally cause the American public to heed the Iraq war critics call to hold the administration accountable for the deaths of more than 500 American service personnel and countless innocent Iraqis (which, strangely, the American government cannot seem to estimate). But let’s not hold our breath. The September 11 tragedy gave the Bush administration body armor that is only now developing chinks. And Kay’s findings help debunk the Iraqi threat but may actually cloud other issues. First, Kay blames U.S. intelligence for not realizing that Iraq’s weapons programs were in shambles. This conclusion is valid, but fits into the administration’s desire to scapegoat U.S. spy agencies to hide its own twisting and embellishing of the already faulty intelligence information.
Second and important to remember during propaganda campaigns preceding any future invasions of “axis of evil” nations: despite all of the government hoopla surrounding weapons of mass destruction prior to and subsequent to September 11, the threat has been hyped. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Department of Defense noted “extant and emerging threats” from 12 nations with nuclear programs, 13 countries with biological weapons and 16 nations with chemical weapons.
Although nuclear, chemical and biological weapons usually fall under the scary (it’s done on purpose) WMD label, only nuclear weapons should be in that category. Chemical weapons have a much smaller area of contamination than do biological and nuclear arms and historically have been less deadly than even conventional bombs. Chemical weapons are best employed by the defending side—if they are used by the attacking side, friendly troops would likely have to advance through the gas. Although chemical weapons are probably the easiest of the three to produce, al Qaeda’s efforts to date have been pathetic. Some infrastructure is needed to produce chemical weapons so detection of production may be possible.
Although biological weapons are better for terrorizing civilian populations than for battlefield use (they take effect slowly and the battle probably will be over by then), weaponizing biological agents takes a great deal of scientific expertise. Aum Shinrikyo, a well-funded Japanese terror group, hired scientists to do so but was unsuccessful. Although small pox could cause casualties on the scale of a nuclear detonation, only a few countries have the virus. A successful attack with either chemical or biological weapons is heavily dependent on favorable weather conditions. Missiles are not the ideal delivery systems for either type of weapon because the agent can be incinerated by heat from the explosive impact.
No one would argue that nuclear weapons are incapable of causing mass destruction. But building nuclear weapons requires a large infrastructure, scientists, engineers and strictly controlled fissile material (plutonium or enriched uranium). Terrorists are probably not capable of building even a crude nuclear weapon. Many countries aren’t either. Iraq and Libya both failed to get such weapons.
But some undesirable countries—for example, North Korea--eventually may get nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them to the United States. North Korea always has been a bigger WMD threat than Iraq. But the United States should rely on its world dominant nuclear arsenal to deter attacks from the small arsenals of nascent nuclear powers, rather than conducting unnecessary preventative invasions. The United States wisely took this route when the totalitarian Soviet Union and the even more radical Maoist China were developing nuclear weapons. Deterrence has worked in the past and will most likely work in the future because the remaining destitute “rogue” have home addresses that can be wiped off the map with thousands of U.S. nuclear warheads. Moreover, even though those nations disagree with intrusive U.S. foreign policy in their regions, they have no incentive to give such costly weapons to unpredictable terrorists groups. If such assistance were discovered, the superpower might be motivated to incinerate their countries. Before the war, the president’s own CIA reported that Iraq would be unlikely to use WMD or give them to terrorists unless the United States invaded.
Although the unnecessary and continuing deaths of Americans and Iraqis are tragic, most alarming for the republic may have been the absence of public outcry to halt the administration’s rush into a war that its own intelligence agency predicted would be counterproductive.
The guy in the White House may not be a libertarian, but Clint Eastwood is. In USA Weekend, Ol' Dirty Harry tells us: "I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. ... I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live."
And also unlike the guy in the White House, Clint adopts a laissez-faire view on same-sex marriages. "From a libertarian point of view," says Clint, "you would say, 'Yeah? So what?' You have to believe in total equality. People should be able to be what they want to be and do what they want -- as long as they're not harming people."
What a simple and refreshing maxim to live by! Like I said here, who said actors know nothing about politics? Courtesy of Greg Ransom at Prestopundit comes this complaint from Andrew Sullivan: "There's barely a speech by President Bush that doesn't cite the glories of human freedom. It's God gift to mankind, he believes. And in some ways this President has clearly expanded it: the people of Afghanistan and Iraq enjoy liberties unimaginable only few years ago. But there's a strange exception to this Bush doctrine. It ends when you reach America's shores."
Sullivan is wrong to see Bush's domestic policy as a "strange exception," at least if American history in the past century can be taken as evidence. Bush's praises of the "glories of human freedom" could easily be culled from the foreign policy speeches of the greatest friends of the welfare/regulatory state of the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson (his true mentor in foreign policy), Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Interestingly, each of these men defended interventionist government at home on the same grounds: it enables greater "freedom."
It is conservatives like Sullivan, who support grand Wilsonian foreign policies overseas but think that they can have small government at home, not Bush, who are emeshed in a contradiction. Bush is merely following a familiar pattern. Given the circumstances, it would have been a "strange exception" if he had pursued a different course in domestic policy.
As my friends well know, I enjoy reading the obituaries in the London press and emailing the text of particularly interesting obits to those who I think might be interested in reading them. In the United States the only newspaper that comes even somewhat close to offering the range and depth of these obituaries is The New York Times but there are just so many interesting and eccentric characters that appear in the London newspapers that escape mention in the NYT.
The London papers come online the previous evening on the East Coast so you can read them before you go to bed. Unfortunately you have to subscribe to The Times online edition but access to The Guardian, The Independent and the Daily Telegraph is free, at least at the time of publication and for a short while afterwards. These, together with the Financial Times, are the so-called (up-market) broadsheets. (Two -- The Times and The Independent -- are now published in tabloid form as well). The FT prints few obituaries but it does offer what is arguably the best foreign news coverage in any English language newspaper.
Navigating the sites is pretty straightforward. Obituaries are under "People" at The Independent. Obituaries in the UK are often more candid than those that appear in the U.S. For example, the anonymous author of The Times obituary of Pamela Harriman identified her as a courtesan, which, of course, she was. Since this obituary is no longer accessible for free, see a short and candid account of her life and loves at Misfit Women. Although Times obituaries are anonymous, the other three newspapers provide the authors' names. Well, it seems that Al Franken is finally going to take the plunge and go
head-to-head with Rush .
Rush needs a thoughtful antiwar competitor but unfortunately Franken is not likely to fill the bill. Even more than Rush, he has slavishly toed the party (in his case DNC) line on nearly all issues including those related to war and peace.
I have to admit, however, that I am not a neutral observer. Back around 1979, when I was in Minneapolis helping to organize protests against Carter's requirement that 19 and 20 year olds register for the draft, Al Franken, a fellow Minnesota boy, was in town. A reporter asked his opinion. He answered in stereotypical yuppie good form: "I don't care because I'm too old to register or get drafted."
In his post just below Radley Balko quotes pundit Mark Shield as saying, "It's an insult to Americans when a politician stands up and says that Americans know better how to spend their own money than the government does. I'm tired of it."
Have we considered the possibility that maybe the government really does know how to spend Mark Shields money better than Mark Shields does? I have been watching Shields on TV, off and on, for years and I have never heard him say anything remotely intelligent.
Friday night on Newshour With Jim Lehrer, Washington Post columnist Mark Shields declared, crankily, "It's an insult to Americans when a politician stands up and says that Americans know better how to spend their own money than the government does. I'm tired of it."
I think it might be applesauce time for Mark Shields.
Now, it is an insult when President Bush says such things, as he did in the SOTU. Because he doesn't mean them.
But Shields was speaking more generally. Leslie Stahl reports on 60 Minutes tonight that as CEO of Halliburton in the mid to late 1990s, now Vice President Cheney oversaw the construction of a Cayman Islands-based subsidiary that was created for the sole purpose helping Iran extract and process oil -- an effort to get around U.S. State Department rules forbidding U.S. companies from doing business with countries that sponsor terrorism.
To this day, that Halliburton subsidiary does business with Iran to the tune of $40 million per year, despite Cheney's current boss designating the country as a charter member of the "Axis of Evil." That $40 million helps Iran extract oil, which funds the Iranian government, which, if you believe the State Department, then funds the gamut of anti-American, anti-Israel international terrorism organizations.
All of this was uncovered by William Thompson, the current comptroller for New York City. Thompson discovered the Halliburton subsidiary while investigating where the 401(k) plans of New York City's cops and firefighters are being invested, to be sure none of that money is going to corporations that do business with states that sponsor terrorism.
Incidentally, while CEO of Halliburton, Cheney also furiously lobbied the State Department to lift its ban on doing business with Libya. The Buzzflash website reports a 1997 article from Oil and Gas Journal which said: The really twisted part is, should the U.S. ever go to war with Iran for its terrorism-sponsoring habit, guess which company will likely get a slew of multimillion dollar contracts? test Well, leave it to the most hawkish of the hawks to prove my point earlier today that nothing -- not the facts, not the disintegration of all their arguments for war with Iraq in the cold light of day, not the fact that our military is close to the breaking point now -- nothing will slow the hawks down in their plans to "remake" the Middle East.
Not content to leave bad enough alone, David Kay has some news for us, beyond the fact that with regard to Iraq's "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq": "I don't think they existed." No, Mr. Kay has this additional tidbit to impart:
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam.
"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved." Shame on you for asking such intemperate questions. This is YOUR GOVERNMENT speaking. You should remain silent, and respectful at all times. They know best -- just as they did in Vietnam.
They are wise, they are just, they have "special knowledge," they are beyond judgment -- and Syria is next in their sights, despite the fact that a military engagement with Syria might well destabilize the entire Middle East and lead to utterly unpredictable, and possibly disastrous, consequences.
Know your place. Be silent and obey.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) test test The New York Times reports:
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.) The New York Times reports:
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.) The New York Times reports:
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.) Does the death of a gangbanger who died in a turf war last year on the streets of Los Angeles or Chicago matter as much as the death of an American soldier in Iraq?
This is the implication of one of Victor Davis Hanson's favorite statistical equivalency arguments which he uses to defend the U.S. military occupation of Iraq:
"500 Americans tragically are dead [in Iraq], a fatality rate as great as those murdered in either Chicago or Los Angeles last year." Thanks to David for inviting me in for permanent residence here at L&P. I'm honored to be in such esteemed company.
Your Cliff's Notes bio of Radley Balko: I was recently hired as a policy analyst for the Cato Institute (read my first paper for them here). My issues include the range of "nanny state" issues, which would include alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity, and to a lesser extent, issues like gambling, pornography, seat belt and helmet laws, and such. It's pretty much a dream job for me, so I'm very excited.
I'm also a columnist for FoxNews.com, a regular contributor to Tech Central Station, and I run TheAgitator.com weblog. Browse a collection of my most recent writing here.
I went to Indiana University in Bloomington, where I studied journalism and political science. Lebanon. Noah Schactman at Defensetech sends along a report from Jane's Intelligence Digest about the next front:
US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia...
Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves. Covert US forces have periodically infiltrated the country over the past two years in order to conduct surveillance and even snatch [Al Qaeda] suspects...
However, sending US special forces into Lebanon - and in particular an area like the Bekaa Valley (which is virtually Syrian territory) and where the bulk of Damascus' military forces in Lebanon are deployed - would be an entirely different matter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops.
Interesting dichotomy in the lists of Modern Library's editors' picks and readers' picks for best nonfiction titles. The reader list is chock full of libertarian titles, which makes me think there may have been some sort of email campaign to skew the results. I'd love to believe that scads of people are rediscovering Paterson and Hazlitt, and reading the likes of Rummel and Friedman, but the evidence just isn't borne out in your typical bar room discussion, call-in to C-SPAN, or letter to the editor.
Nice to see Mencken crack the top ten on the editors' list, though. Sad to see Rachel Carson in the top five.
Hat tip: Marginal Revolution. The Mobile Register has
editorially deplored the violation of the Alabama Scholar Association's free speech rights:
"University of Alabama administrators are being small-minded about faculty dissent on the Tuscaloosa campus. A university's role should be to stimulate discussion, not to suppress it.
UA's target is the Alabama Scholars Association
Read More Here
Can I get this as a cellphone ring?
Link courtesy of Alan Gura. Clever title courtesy of Max Sawicky, who proves that Walt Whitman isn't just for picking up interns anymore. In one of my very first undergraduate political science courses at New York University, I studied with H. Mark Roelofs, who wrote Ideology and Myth in American Politics. I'll never forget the first class: I swear ... he sounded like a villain out of an Ayn Rand novel. "There is no such thing as objectivity," he bellowed. "This class will be devoted to my opinion. You can certainly try to interject your own opinions, but I won't be listening." I figured it would be downhill from that point on.
The truth is that he was listening to our opinions, and out of the course came some of the most spirited and challenging discussions in which I'd ever participated.
One of the most provocative aspects of Roelofs' 1976 classic book was his view that the American political system's resilience camouflaged congenital problems in the American political mind. While I rejected Roelofs' leftish criticisms of Lockean liberal ideology, I appreciated, from a libertarian perspective, his stress upon the fundamental frustration embedded in the Madisonian universe of checks-and-balances. For sure, Madison's vision had frustrated—thank goodness—the emergence of totalitarian political movements. But Madison wrote during a time when the scope of government was much more limited. Upon constitutional contradictions and war-making capacity, the government gradually gained more and more influence over every aspect of social life. Madison's "checks and balances" gradually morphed into an institutionalized civil war among competing interest groups, each vying for some special privilege at the expense of the others.
That's why Friedrich Hayek had argued: The Worst Always Get on Top. As the government has expanded the scope of its power, government power has become the only power worth having. The system encourages those who are most adept at using that power, and who, by such use, rise to the upper echelons of political institutions.
So, despite the "Lockean myth" that prioritizes individuals, the reality of the mixed economy reciprocally reinforces the reality of Madisonian checks and balances. Paradoxically, that reality encourages the emergence of both political collectivism and social atomism: It nourishes the development of ad hoc groups, because groups become the only political units that matter. Simultaneously, it atomizes a society, as people-in-groups become increasingly fragmented and fractured across every dimension, in search of this or that privilege or exemption: a Hobbesian "war of all against all"—which goes global.
Rand characterized it as an intensifying process of "global balkanization": the statist manufacturing of pressure groups, which pits "ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, welfare-recipient against the self-supporting," and so on and so on. Every differentiating human characteristic becomes the basis for another battle in the war for privilege: age, size, sex, sexual orientation, social status, religion, nationality, race, etc. Each of these groups attempts to use government to subsidize its ventures, socialize its risks, or otherwise restrict the access of its competitors.
It is a system that has evolved structurally, and it doesn't matter much who is elected to political office. It may matter to the specific interests who influence this or that politician—indeed, a persuasive case can be made that not every pressure group is equally represented and that this is the nature of a crony capitalism in which some cronies are more equal than others. But the elections don't affect the fundamental structure of political privilege as such.
That's why Roelofs saw the President as the "baron" of American myth-making. It's not that the President is without the ability to affect profoundly, through rhetoric and action, the body politic. It's that the war of all against all is so deeply woven into the tapestry of the American political system that the President is almost irrelevant. He may give voice to this or that special interest or speak of the "common good," he may go off on this or that foreign adventure, but he simply can't alter the nature of the system. "Given the dispersed character of the political system generally," Roelofs writes, "no president can build up and extend his authority into objective patterns of sustained control." There are simply other forces at work, and in the long-run, who is elected matters little to the ways in which the system functions.
Of course, I remain a political junkie. I am routinely entertained—and sometimes nauseated—by politics. Among friends, I've been predicting that Howard Dean's foaming-at-the-mouth style would get him into major trouble, and that if he were the Democratic nominee, he'd probably go down to a McGovern-style defeat, which might even be perceived as a "defeat" for the antiwar movement that he allegedly endorses. Now, with Dean's meltdown, we may actually witness a race! Will Diane Sawyer save him tonight? Will nice guy John Edwards—that's Edwards with an "S" not Psychic Guy—finish last? Will John Kerry get a haircut? Will Bush's boots be made for walkin' ... all over these guys? Stay tuned! It's a thrilling soap opera!
But here's the bottom line: Why on earth does any of this matter? What does it matter who gets elected? What's the sense of it? Sure, you can register your protests by voting defensively, against this or that candidate. But until or unless this system is fundamentally transformed, it's almost immaterial who becomes President.
I don't believe this is cause for grief. I suppose we should count our blessings that we live in a society of dispersed oppression, given the totalitarian alternative, even if we've traveled a long way down the road to serfdom over the last hundred years.
But I reject the premise that the only choice we have is between dispersed and totalistic systems of oppression. The libertarian ideal is a revolutionary one, a grand challenge to all forms of oppression. It will require nothing less than a philosophical, cultural, intellectual, and political revolution to achieve. Dubya's spending spree is so obvious that even many pro-war Republican organizations are increasingly unwilling to rationalize it. A new report by Alison Fraser of the conservative Heritage Foundation stated that "Spending has increased twice as fast under President Bush as it did under President Clinton. [National Security related spending] accounts less than half of the new spending that has occurred since 9/11."
I suppose that this means that more folks from Heritage will be cut from White House dinner invitation lists. My guess, however, is that replacements will be found at the more reliably pro-Bush American Enterprise Institute . An Associated Press canvass of the candidates on what album they'd most like to pop into their CD players turns up gospel, opera, hip-hop, country and rock.
The rock fans are Wesley Clark, who likes Journey's "Greatest Hits"; Sen. John Edwards, "The Essential Bruce Springsteen"; and Sen. John Kerry, the Beatles' "Abbey Road."
Howard Dean singled out the music of Grammy-winning hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean. Rep. Dennis Kucinich chose country's Willie Nelson (who has endorsed him), and Al Sharpton favored gospel's Yolanda Adams. Sen. Joe Lieberman's favorite album is "Sueno," by classical Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.
I've got this image of Wes Clark with that thousand-yard stare, hunched down in his bus seat, muttering to himself "wheel in the sky keeps on turning/wheel in the sky keeps on turning" on and on and on through the frozen wasteland of NH. [Link courtesy of Atrios.] To the amazement of many, Bush is championing the boondoggle known as NASA in a bid both to set up permanent human digs on the moon and to reach Mars. At the same time he shows no interest in privatizing space and exploration despite private entrepreneurs almost begging to do so at their own expense. Conspiracy theories abound. Wired claims that Bush's proposal is actually a plot to kill off NASA projects. Others speculate whether the timing of the Bush announcement, coming shortly after a successful Chinese space mission and shortly before a U.S. election, is a coincidence.
The most plausible explanation I've heard comes from my friend Gordon Pusch who pointed out that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have bought into what has been called the "Vision for 2020" -- a space age "Project for the New American Century" -- that calls for U.S. military superiority (and exclusivity) in space. This goal requires (and does not yet have) a "heavy lift" capability into space: launchers that could put massive payloads into orbit. (The Shuttle won't lift enough payload, and can't launch frequently enough.) A few billion won't get very far along the road to Mars, but it will pay for launcher development. And, as it happens, heavy launchers would be the first thing needed by the Moon/Mars program. Moon/Mars is a lovely "civilian" cover to develop these heavy lifters, which otherwise can't be justified -- weather and communications satellites need only small launchers. With heavy lifters, the U.S. could then deny the use of space to other nations. But to militarize and to enforce a monopoly, the development and operation would have to be under U.S. government control: thus, NASA. Much thanks to Instapundit and Cliopatria for publicizing the breaking news on the continuing threat to free speech at the University of Alabama .
Every little bit helps. Unfortunately, the administration here seems to have dug in its heals.
On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show tonight they did a story on the Iowa Caucus and Stephen Colbert said that Howard Dean’s numbers had “dropped like a duck on Demerol.”
I agree with Chris Matthew Sciabarra when he said in his post yesterday, referring to the Democratic Party nominating process after the Iowa results, that, “This might actually be fun to watch.” Though, I hope it is not too much fun because that could mean a brokered convention and President Hillary Clinton. Frankly, I do not want to live in her village.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to watch the History Channel's documentary on Little Big Horn this weekend, but I did happen to catch the promos for the show which billed the event as "America's bloodiest race war."
Beyond the smart-alecky observation that this curious terminology sounds both politically correct and Mansonesque at the same time, I don't have much comment on this. However, I would love to hear some commentary on the use of this term from L&P's resident historians and from the nice folks over at Cliopatria.
Perhaps, someone would be interested in offering their thoughts on the following questions too. From a historical perspective what defines a "race war?" Has the U.S. ever suffered such a traumatic event? If so, which events so qualify and why? Lastly, what separates a "race war" from 'lesser grade' ethnic conflicts? Actual headline from the Christian Science Monitor:
As he bids for reelection, the president will focus on the terror war, jobs, outer space, and marriage.
Here's a revelation from the Paul O'Neill book that isn't getting nearly as much play as it deserves:
Mr. O'Neill also pushed the president to set aside $1 trillion of the projected surpluses to fund one of Mr. Bush's big ideas during the campaign: the privatization of Social Security. Allowing people to invest Social Security contributions into private retirement accounts would reduce the government's future retirement liabilities, but the government would need to cover obligations to existing retirees without the money coming in from existing workers.
Mr. O'Neill said that both he and Mr. Greenspan had estimated that $1 trillion over the next decade or so would be enough to finance the transition for everybody then under the age of 37.
But Mr. Bush "seemed to shrug it off,'' according to the book.
I'm Mark and I'm your guest blogger this week. Thank you, David, for your kind invitation to blog at Liberty & Power. I'm looking forward to the week ahead.
For those who don't know me, I've been a libertarian for well over thirty years. I was born in Windsor and grew up in Egham, a small town southwest of London and very near Runnymede, where King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215. I have resided in the U.S. for twenty of the past twenty-five years. For many years I taught economics in schools, colleges and universities in Britain, Ireland and California. More recently I was a program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies, where I organized and directed student seminars, evaluated fellowship applications and mentored students. Now I work primarily in the private sector with high-school students. Since my childhood I have enthusiastically collected books and have even found time to read some of them.
It's been a while since I last looked at Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Yesterday afternoon I had occasion to return to this book and was immediately reminded of how much better it is than Free to Choose (1980). Much better because, whatever Friedman's inconsistencies from the perspective of hard-core libertarianism (and I suggest he has fewer than F. A. Hayek), it remains a succinct statement of the case for individual liberty and the free market. Indeed, I heard Friedman once say that he thought it was the better book because it was shorter.
Chapter VII on Capitalism and Discrimination is in many respects an excellent treatment of the topic. He concludes (pp.117-18) with a discussion of whether the state should enforce segregation or integration in public schools (and thus addresses the more general question of what real liberals should want the government to do if it already exists). If forced to choose, he states that he would opt for enforced integration. He then makes the case for vouchers that would permit parents to select a segregated school for their child if this were their choice. I got to speculating whether Friedman would be prepared to make this argument (about vouchers) today. I wasn't surprised to find that the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation at www.friedmanfoundation.org doesn't address this issue. And I haven't come across anyone currently campaigning for school vouchers who has endorsed Friedman's 1962 statement. But I'd like to think Friedman would not repudiate his original position if asked. He might say that it isn't so much of an issue now as it was in 1962. That's probably true but I guess it's more of an issue than some defenders of vouchers would have us believe.
Chapter VIII on Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor is also well worth reading. (So for that matter is the entire book, whatever criticisms libertarians would make of his advocacy of government intervention in money, school finance, etc.) This chapter got me thinking about how self-identified libertarian, classical liberal and conservative organizations inside and outside the Beltway tap corporate sponsors for contributions. Friedman writes (p.133):
Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.
Later he writes (p.135):
One topic in the area of social responsibility that I feel duty-bound to touch on, because it affects my own personal interests, has been the claim that business should contribute to the support of charitable activities and especially to universities. Such giving by corporations is an inappropriate use of corporate funds in a free-enterprise society.
He concludes (p.136):
[T]he direction in which policy is now moving, of permitting corporations to make contributions for charitable purposes and allowing deductions for income tax, is a step in the direction of creating a true divorce between ownership and control and of undermining the basic nature and character of our society. It is a step away from an individualistic society and toward the corporate state.
I suppose Friedman might temper his strictures against corporate donations to charities and universities -- and, by extension, public policy institutes, advocacy groups and PACs and political candidatures -- in the case of private corporations where the owners unanimously agree on the donations. That said, I don't see that contributing to policy institutes, pressure groups and political campaigns is profit-maximizing behavior in a way that making other sorts of contribution is not. And certainly both donors and beneficiaries strenuously deny the fact. There now arises an interesting question. I'm not aware that avowedly free-market institutes refrain from soliciting funds from public or private corporations where charitable contributions are decided by majority vote of the board of directors. The question, dear readers, is should they? And what about charitable foundations, where a board of trustees may fail to implement deceased donors' wishes?
Sean Reilly from the Washington Bureau of the Mobile Register has penned a lengthy article about the University of Alabama's ban of the Alabama Observer. The Observer is the newspaper of an organization I head, the Alabama Scholars Association. The article begins:
"A conservative faculty organization at the University of Alabama is accusing administrators of censorship after the group was barred from using the campus mail system to distribute its newspaper without regular postage.
Leaders of the organization, known as the Alabama Scholars Association, charge that the decision is payback for their efforts to shake up the status quo, including a proposal for term limits for university administrators and a report that found widespread grade inflation in some departments.
"It's just an effort to quash any sort of dissent," the association's president, history professor David Beito, said last week.
For the whole thing, see here .
For political junkies, like myself, this is the kind of competitive season on which I feast. No, I'm not talking about the return of "American Idol" (which is always a hoot to watch). I'm talking about the Presidential primary season.
Arthur Silber has some very nice musings on the subject of the Iowa caucus and the Presidential race, especially the need for a positive tone. I must admit that I took a perverse pleasure in seeing the pundits fall flat on their faces with regard to the Howard Dean "juggernaut." With Kerry coming in first, Edwards in second, and Dean in third (Gephardt is now down and out), it brought to mind the insight of philosopher Yogi Berra who said "It ain't over til it's over." The pundits were telling us it was over before it even began. This might actually be fun to watch.
The world is surely not a fun place, however. Abroad, the situation in Iraq is volatile; even the Taliban is staging a return engagement in Afghanistan. At home, the increase in government intervention has had a deleterious impact on everything from the deficit to civil liberties. Bush, who gives his State of the Union address this evening, still looks like a winner to me. But the season is young. Stay tuned. Another point about consumer sovereignty: producers are consumers too. Suppose you want to hire me to teach a philosophy course with only multiple-choice tests, but I refuse to offer the course unless I can give essay tests. Does this conflict with consumer sovereignty? Not at all. Teaching the course my way is a consumption good for me; it's part of the price I demand for my services. And of course each of us is free to take or leave the other's offer.
No, says Joe Nathan: (Crossposted at SCSU Scholars.) The U.S. Postal Service will issue a a special stamp honoring Paul Robeson . Robeson's son denies that his father was an actual member of the Communist Party. Perhaps. This is somewhat beside the point, however.
The historical record is crystal clear that Paul Robeson was an enthusiastic and zealous defender of a man who was, second to Mao, the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century . He continued to defend Stalin long after convincing proof of his crimes became readily apparent.
When I first started to write this blog, I was going to condemn the decision to issue the stamp. On second thought, however, perhaps it makes sense for a lumbering and inefficient state monopoly like the U.S. Postal Service to honor a man who defended the creator of many similar lumbering and inefficient monpolies in his own country. [Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Sure, he's an abrasive, stubby little guy with angry-short-man complex, but Howard Dean may not be all bad. For one thing, he doesn't like to talk about himself; for another, he won't return Maureen Dowd's phone calls. As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: "The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You'll Never Know who won Iowa." (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, "The Vanishing.") The implication here is that there is something wrong with the caucus system, as if there is some one right, especially legitimate, way to choose delegates for a national party convention. There is no poll booth in a caucus, it's just a bunch of people hanging out in a room. And your first preference doesn't necessarily get registered (if your favorite candidate fails to cross a threshold, then you've got to wander over to some other more successful canidate's posse to be counted). And there is no simple constant relationship between the number of people who stand for a candidate at caucus and the number of delegates you finally get. This all seems to annoy Saletan and Schiller, who apparently think democracy essentially has something to do with adding up raw preferences in order to descry the ding an sich of the general will. They need to get over their journalist's fetishism for polls, and stop thinking democracy is the same thing as an especially big Zogby survey. We all should know by now that every voting scheme is arbitrary in its own way, and that there's no general will to be expressed. Democracy, if it's worth anything, is only secondarily about counting heads. First, it's about procedures for social choice that diffuse power, that citizens will regard as legitimate, and which contribute to the stable, predictable functioning of the social order. People in Iowa LIKE the caucus, which is a prima facie good reason to also like the caucus. Iowans like getting together with people in their neighborhood, and talking over issues, and standing for their candidates. And there is a perfectly good procedure for deciding the winner of the caucus, and most everyone thinks that's just fine, too. Delegates get selected. So it adequately serves the superficial democratic function. But the caucus is also a community experience that brings Iowans togethers, that provides them with a sense of choosing and governing together in a way much more intimate than the casting of anonymous ballots. And in this way, the caucus serves democracy's deeper purposes very well. Saletan and Schilller ridiculously compare what promises to be a very close caucus to the 2000 Florida presidential vote count:
Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at. This strikes me as dumb. Given the nature of the Florida debacle, shouldn't it have occured to them that this is a virtue of the caucus? Courtesy of LRC blog , Ron Paul, the most principled member of the U.S. House of Representatives, will be running unopposed in the 2004 election . For those of you who don't know, Paul has courageously and consistently opposed the Iraq war and occupation. He has also spoken out against such boondogles as the NASA shuttle (despite the fact that many NASA workers live his district) and criticized the federal war on drugs.
I was afraid that pro-war elements in the GOP leadership would target him for defeat but apparently they realized that he was too popular. This may be due to Paul's abundant talent for constituent service, a rare trait for a hard-nosed libertarian.
Ron Paul is a wonderful example of how a principled politician can have his cake and eat it too.
Throwing out decades of secular family law for women, the Iraqi Governing Council has endorsed making them subject to Shari'a law . Not even Saddam did that. This is a big step backward for Iraqi women and yet more evidence that the neo-con dream of turning Iraq into Muslim version of Kansas is a chimera. I have been told that there was an article on this subject in this morning's Washington Post. The international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders -- Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) -- has completed its investigation of the US Army's attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, '03 in which two reporters staying there died. RSF concluded that the deaths "were not a deliberate attack [by the US] on the media. However, it [RSF] said US soldiers should have been told by their commanders that many journalists were based in the hotel....It was an act of criminal negligence for which responsibility should clearly be established." In short, the accusation is not murder but manslaughter.
But blame is laid at the feet of the Pentagon and military commanders, not soldiers in-the-field who fired upon the hotel. According to story in the UK Independent, "Despite information being available to the Pentagon, the report said `the soldiers in the field were never told that a large number of journalists were in the Palestine Hotel. If they had known they would not have fired. When they did know, they gave and received instructions and took precautions to ensure the hotel was not fired on again'." RSF accuses US authorities of concocting lies to hide what happened and calls their subsequent official `investigation' "nothing more than a whitewash." RSF is calling for the US to launch a formal investigation into the deaths of Ukrainian cameramen Taras Protsyuk (Reuters) and Spaniard José Couso (Telecinco). The report can be downloaded in full [.pdf] from the RWB site.
The Bush adminstration's love affair with the media is starting to crack and be revealed as a heartless flirtation that lasts only as long as the object of "love" comes across. Domestically, prominent sources like the Washington Times are reporting daily on touchy matters, like the unusually high and quickly rising suicide rate for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Or the fact that about 2,500 soldiers who have returned from the war have to wait for medical care at bases in the US. And, in Iraq, now that embedded journalists from major American news sources -"embedded" was the term used to refer to journalists allowed to accompany American troops on the march toward Baghdad, otherwise known as "in bed" journalists -- now that they have been largely replaced by foreign ones who have not been bought off in some manner or intimidated, there are increasing cries of the US military brutalizing the press. Last week, for example, Reuters filed "a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the 'wrongful' arrest and apparent `brutalisation' of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq."
I am sorry to say that the left is in the forefront of protest against Bush's systematic, transparent and sometimes savage quashing of truth. Tim Robbins' play "Embedded," opens February 24th at the Public Theater in New York. (It premiered on Nov. 15, 2003, at The Actors' Gang in Los Angeles; the promotional art for that performance captures the essence of the play}}.) "Embedded" has been described as "a ripped-from-the-headlines satire about the madness surrounding the brave women and men on the front lines in a Middle East conflict. [It] skewers cynical embedded journalists, scheming government officials, a show-tune singing colonel, and the media's insatiable desire for heroes." Robbins has come under a great deal of criticism for his opposition to the war, the most famous incident being the cancellation of a scheduled screening of the Robbins baseball comedy "Bull Durham" explicitly because of the actor's views. Best to all, Wendy McElroy
Yesterday brought me two reminders of what very well may turn out to be the worst aspect of the Bush Administration’s ill advised endeavor of nation building in Iraq. The first came in the form of a link to an extremely moving remembrance of the events that happened on 9-11 in words, pictures, and audio. The second occurred when I read Chris Matthew Sciabarra's post “Hussein, Bin Laden, and Gramsci.”
My cousin was employed by the N.Y.F.D. and he died when one of the towers collapsed on him. Therefore on a personal level, I wholeheartedly supported the war in Afghanistan as necessary and just but I do not believe that Saddam Hussein had anything to with my cousin’s death. We must remember that most people in the country do not share my opinion on this. In the build up to the invasion of Iraq the Bush people very cleverly tied 9-11 and Hussein together and this highly unlikely connection remains strong in the minds of most Americans. Now I do not know whether Bush did it for oil profits, his place in history, to uphold his own family’s honor, or because he really believes the nonsense being put forth by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz but I do know that when he invaded Iraq the grief of and justice for my family and all the other families affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center took a back seat in our national policy.
The war in Iraq has cost us global good will, lives, resources, and the focus necessary to combat our real enemies. I urge you to watch and listen to the above link and then ask yourself how can George Bush’s war on terror be considered anything other than a failure as long as Osama Bin Laden and his ilk remain free?
It looks like Bush is losing the base.
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Ed at The Captain's Quarters has a story today of a student who doesn't quite understand TANSTAAFL. If we do not educate our kids enough in economics to at least know the omnipresence of reality, this student will become more and more common. (Crossposted at SCSU Scholars) I totally agree with Will's sentiments on the President's federal "couples counseling" initiative. Not only is it a risibly stupid idea, it illustrates the administration's utter contempt for constitutional limits.
Lately I've had my eye out for stories that illustrate what a collosal joke the Bush administration has been. Here are a couple:
Describing the president's plan to build a moon base, an unnamed administration official says: "It's a national unifying thing, it's a world unifying thing." Plus it's good for aerospace contractors, as Karl Rove, who was in on all these discussions, surely pointed out.
But probably my favorite is in the following profile of conservative guru Grover Norquist from Monday's WaPo, in which Norquist is seen pleading with the administration's budget flack for the daily spin:
When Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, came, Norquist asked, "For those of us on the outside, when someone sticks a mike in our face and says, 'Spending is up! You guys on the right are failing,' what are the talking points?"
Bolten rattled off the budget statistics that he could use.
Yet under Bush, the largest budget surplus in history has become the largest deficit in history. In the past, Norquist has said he wants to shrink government "down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub." Now, glancing up at Bolten, Norquist ventured politely: "Is there a single agency you want to get rid of? It would be really helpful for us to say, 'This administration wants to get rid of . . . ' "
It's pretty clear from the article that Norquist didn't get an answer.
While the debate over the yet-to-be-found Iraqi WMDs continues, let's not forget that one of the other prime reasons for the US invasion was alleged evidence of "ties" between Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime. Because there were networks of Al Qaeda and Iraqi interests, some Bush administration officials suggested a full-fledged alliance was afoot.
I've no doubt that there were informal networks and, perhaps, even a few formal meetings between various Iraqi and Al Qaeda representatives. I didn't realize, however, that the existence of such networks would be a pretext for an invasion. Back in December, a Yemeni cleric was arraigned on charges that he had funneled $20 million in terror aid to Al Qaeda from a Brooklyn mosque. The cleric, Al-Moayad, allegedly bragged of two meetings with Bin Laden, to whom he "personally delivered" money and resources. Since the money came from a Brooklyn network, I fear it's only a matter of time before my hometown faces a US ground assault.
In the meanwhile, there is lots of evidence piling up to show that the hatred between Bin Laden and Hussein—which many of us noted in our debates with pro-war advocates—remained a real obstacle to any genuine alliance between them. Earlier this month, another one of those Bin Laden tapes surfaced, wherein the voice of Al Qaeda referred to the secular Saddam as the United States' "previous comrade in treachery, a hireling of America."
Now comes this news about Hussein's profound opposition to the jihad-loving Islamicists, an opposition that has not waned, even though Hussein is out of power. James Resin of the NY Times writes:
All of this brings to mind, once again, that the Arab-Islamic world is not a monolith. In Iraq alone, the political, ethnic and ideological rivalries remain a great obstacle to democratic "nation-building." And when each of the rivals lacks the philosophical or cultural predisposition toward political freedom, I shudder to think of the kind of "nation" that is being built.
This speaks, at least tangentially, to issues raised by Will Wilkinson here, when he asks: "Does libertarianism, understood as an ideal for society, require, in order to be feasibly realized, that all or most members of society accept and endorse a certain set of moral and political premises?" I've long believed that libertarians can learn a lot from Antonio Gramsci, who, Marxist though he was, understood the importance of creating "a bloc of historical forces," a cultural hegemony that makes the need for a political revolution superfluous. We don't have to accept Gramsci's ideas for a socialist culture to appreciate the fact that a free society of whatever degree depends upon a certain constellation of philosophical and cultural premises; even if we never achieve full-fledged libertarianism, political freedom is only as good and sustainable as the cultural base upon which it is built.
And that is why I have been relentless in my emphasis on the cultural prerequisites for freedom in Iraq. Bad enough that the US itself is attempting to construct its way to Iraqi freedom with the tools of crony capitalism. Worse still: Constructivist impositions on a culture, which has no conception of Western democracy or freedom, cannot create or sustain either. David Bernstein shows again why he is one of the more thought-provoking of the new libertarian scholars who write on black history and the history of civil rights. I often learn something new about history when I read his published work and his posts at the Volokh Conspiracy (though we sometimes disagree on foreign policy).
In his latest post, he writes "I'm teaching the Civil Rights Cases (1883) tomorrow which invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875's prohibition of discrimination by inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement, as beyond the Congress's power under the 13th and 14th Amendments. In debates over Lochner and constitutional protection of economic liberty more generally, liberal scholars will sometimes refer to the Civil Rights Cases as an example of the evils of of constitutional protection for economic liberty, arguing that the Court upheld economic libery at the expense of civil rights. As I read the Cases, however, the majority's opinion is solely based on federalism and has nothing to do with economic liberty or property rights." Read the whole thing . Senator Rick Santorum was in a pedagogical frame of mind:
U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania made his remarks yesterday afternoon, in an interview with senior editors of The Union Leader. His lengthy attack against Edwards came in response to a question asking about Santorum’s impression of the Democratic primary field and particularly his three Senate colleagues in the race. ...
“The basic perception in the Republican caucus was that [Edwards] is just an empty suit, that he just simply doesn’t understand,” Santorum continued. “My feeling is that he’s a nice guy, he makes a very nice appearance, but I don’t think he has the understanding, and the depth of understanding, of how government works and how these kinds of things affects the everyday person." The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society. Not that I care for Edwards' version of nanny-state liberalism. But if I had to choose between these two alternatives, Santorum's version of a theocracy is significantly worse, in terms of the way it would "affect[] the everyday person."
But one of these days, perhaps we'll have another choice -- someone who champions strictly limited government, and individual rights. One of these days...but probably not any time soon.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Will's post below is right on the
money, especially this bit: Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual
revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention
that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And
they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism,
which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic
autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as
a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations,
and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood This is a point I've tried to make in other contexts: pining for a world where
markets are free and vigorous and the culture remains untouched is asking for
the impossible. Conservatives just seem to miss this entirely. It is the very
wealth, technology, and resources devoted to education that capitalism has
made possible that has been largely responsible for the profound changes
in gender roles that we've seen in the last 35 years. To claim to support free
markets yet to expect that these sorts of changes can be prevented, stopped,
or reversed is just not possible. You can't stand athwart the market and yell
"stop." This is one reason why I really like Virginia Postrel's work. She
gets the dynamism of the market-culture interaction. Will is also quite right to note that the feminist movement is "as much a response
as cause" of the increased economic independence of women. If you look at the
data on female labor force participation, it was climbing well before the 1960s,
suggesting that the feminist movement may well have been more a response to
the fact that women were getting out there in the market and realizing the
changes that needed to take place culturally and legally. A very readable book
on all of this is Stephanie Coontz's "The
Way We Never Were." Will's post also raises another question that fascinates me: economic theory
predicts (and Dick McKenzie and Gordon Tullock did so explicitly in 1975) that
as women's wages rise, the burden of housework should shift more toward men.
If the division of labor between the market and the household is driven by
the opportunity cost of each partner's time, then as the cost of women's time
at
home rises
with
their wages, we should see them doing less housework and men doing more, at
least relative to each other if not absolutely. The evidence from time diaries
is that men have picked up, no pun intended, a bit more of the work in the
household, but not nearly in proportion to the gain in women's wages. It's
an interesting question why women continue to bear the burden of what sociologists
call the "second shift." I have a few thoughts on why, but I'm going to hold
those for a bit. What's interesting to me is the ways in which libertarians
have largely not investigated these sorts of cultural questions, nor do we
feel especially comfortable discussing them if there's no apparent link to
the intervention of the state. I think that's a mistake - in the long run,
if libertarianism is going to gain ground both intellectually and politically,
it's going to have to address these sorts of questions. They take up too much
space in many people's day-to-day existence to just shrug because the state
has no big role. While it is certainly amusing seeing George Bush being portrayed as an alternately detached or conniving incompetent by his ex-Treasury Department head Paul O’Neill, according to two good columns in today’s Washington Times, one by Stephen Moore and the other by Bruce Bartlett, it seems O’Neill was no great shakes as Treasury Secretary himself.
Link to cartoon here. This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide "$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages.'" This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy. I'm sure the government will soon come around to the view that single people need listening skills too! And it's nice to be assured that the state will stay its healing hand and won't force us into riveting 50 minute sessions down at the community center with besweatered, milquetoast PsyDs anxious to tell us how to live our lives. "In order to increase your compassion for one another, you need first to have greater compassion for nature. Try not eating meat for a week, and see if you don't find yourself more sensitive to your partner's feelings!" or, worse "The first thing we've got to talk about is Jesus. Is Jesus in your life? There's no reason NOT to beat your wife if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. I like to say that family that prays together stays together."
Coming soon to a church basement near you. [Link from Tyler Cowen @ the Volokhs.] Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore's loathing of whiners, all he seems to manage is a mannered, whining lament for classical "thumotic" masculinity. One hopes for more from social critics. Moore's essay is a perfect example of the kind of rote conservative judgment that I complained about yesterday in a post about the films of Whit Stillman. Moore just can't seem to accept that there are new conventions, for better or worse, and so cannot bring himself to think critically and usefully of what it means to live a life within those conventions, rather than bleat impotently about the lost world. Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism, which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations, and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood. What we need is a rethinking of what it is to be a man when women don't need us economically, don't require our paternalistic care, don't conceive of themselves primarily as baby-making machines, and thus look to relationships with men to meet human needs beyond economics, protection, and reproduction. We men haven't quite figured this out yet, and so, yes, we are a bit adrift about how exactly to express our masculinity in today's world. But it does no good to quote C.S. Lewis at us, and blame us for lacking sufficient martial virtue. Moore, obviously a smart guy, should go make himself useful and think hard about what we men should be and do now given that our social role is irreversibly changed and women are never going back to the gilded cage. Apparently, the mortar rounds found by the Danes were not chemical weapons after all . Via Sam Koritz at Antiwar.com Blog : "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a
permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." ~ Ernest Hemingway I continue to find it altogether remarkable that many conservatives and even many "libertarians," who don't trust the government to do much of anything very well on the domestic front, still believe that the same government has the wisdom to remake large portions of the globe, and to bring "democracy" to oppressed countries.
Well, they're probably right. Two years after 9/11, it seems that everything here in the United States is going just swimmingly:
It wasn't a real bomb, just a suspicious-looking black plastic bag stuffed with garbage. And the culprits weren't terrorists, but investigators from the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General, out to demonstrate the monument's vulnerability on that infamous anniversary.
As documented in photos and a memo obtained by The Reliable Source, the feds left the bag at the rear of the obelisk for 20 minutes, then moved it near a security checkpoint where tourists lined up to enter the landmark. "Again, the unidentified bag sat there, undisrupted and unnoticed, for roughly 15 minutes," wrote Inspector General Earl E. Devaney in the memo, citing his "grave concerns for the security and public safety at these facilities."
No Park Police could be seen on patrol, except for one in an unmarked car who "appeared to be sound asleep," Devaney wrote. I feel much, much safer -- and I'm very anxious to start planning trips to famous and prominent national monuments again, now that I know how well protected I will be. Via Rick Shenkman at the History News Network, the Washington Post reports the following:
"A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat."
I want to thank David Beito for inviting me to join Liberty & Power for a week. I know some of the members of the L & P roster fairly well, and others not at all. I'm dork enough that a number of my most treasured friendships began on the internet. So I hope I come out of this with more couches in other cities where I could in principle crash. A little about me... Until the middle of November, I worked at the Mercatus Center in the Mason Law School building. Before that, I was a program director at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I still direct IHS's Social Change Workshop for Graduate students each summer at the University of Virginia. I bailed from Mercatus to try to finish my PhD work in philosophy at the University of Maryland, where I'm concentrating on political philosophy (contractarian political philosophy in particular.) This semester I'll be teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, a few blocks from my house in DC. Right now I'm scrambling to put together a syllabus, since the gig just dropped in my lap in a couple days ago. I have to admit to a skoche of trepidation at visiting L&P. I may be among the few to work at IHS for two-ish years and come out of it rather less libertarian, in the traditional sense at least. I started out in philosophy and politics under the sway of Ayn Rand, like several others here, but my intellectual trajectory has led me to be fairly skeptical of the cogency of most of the usual arguments that purport to justify a libertarian social order. More and more I'm finding unacceptable the usual terms of debate in political philosophy, and particularly among libertarians. The upshot of this is that although I have deeply libertarian intuitions, I'm not sure exactly what I think any more, although I'm sure of what I don't think. Relative to this crowd, I am, without a doubt, a squish. (Yes, I'm even up in the air about heroin vending machines for tots.) I hope this week to air a few questions I've been grappling with and to provoke some productive argument. Let's start with this worry... Does libertarianism, understood as an ideal for society, require, in order to be feasibly realized, that all or most members of society accept and endorse a certain set of moral and political premises? If so, how is this convergence in views to be produced? Through reasoned argument? Rhetoric? If some level of agreement on basic premises is not required, how is it possible for a libertarian order to emerge and sustain itself? What I'm asking is: Can we get there from here? And if there is no feasible path to the ideal, then isn't the ideal utopian, and shouldn't we stop aiming at it? Your Bush-Germany, or Bush-Hitler, comparison for the week -- or more likely the year -- does not come from me. No, no: it comes courtesy of a new report on the war on terror from the Army War College, the Army's "premier academic institution." And as noted in the Washington Post story about the report:
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said. Both terrorist organizations and rogue states embrace violence and are hostile to the existing international order. Many share a common enemy in the United States and, for rogue states and terrorist organizations in the Middle East, a common enemy in Israel. As international pariahs they are often in contact with one another and at times even cooperate. But the scope and endurance of such cooperation is highly contingent on local circumstances. More to the point, rogue states and terrorist organizations are fundamentally different in character and vulnerability to U.S. military power. Terrorist organizations are secretive, elusive, nonstate entities that characteristically possess little in the way of assets that can be held hostage; as The National Security Strategy points out, a terrorist enemy’s "most potent protection is statelessness."47 In contrast, rogue states are sovereign entities defined by specific territories, populations, governmental infrastructures, and other assets; as such, they are much more exposed to decisive military attack than terrorist organizations.
Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number. A strategy whose ambitions provoke the formation of an array of enemies whose defeat exceeds the resources available to that strategy is doomed to failure. The Germans were defeated in two world wars notwithstanding their superb performance at the operational and tactical levels of combat because their strategic ends outran their available means; their declared strategic ambitions provoked formation of an opposing coalition of states whose collective resources in the end overwhelmed those of Germany. (Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Horwitz squares off against Jonah Goldberg, sort of. Slate is featuring an online chat on second thoughts by liberal hawks. It features center-left pundits and analysts who backed Bush on Iraq and explores whether they're having misgivings. Participants include Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. So far only Weisberg and Pollack have weighed in--each with more self-examination and critical thinking than many of their right-wing counterparts have shown.
It would seem, though, that liberal hawks should have less buyer's remorse than conservative ones. The humanitarian justifications for war in Iraq haven't lost any strength 10 months after the war began. On the post-war evidence, Saddam Hussein appears to have been every bit the bastard he was said to be. It's the conservative, threat-based justifications that have failed to pan out. I'd like to see a similar discussion among right-wing hawks. But I'm not confident we'll see it. Two recent events have brought Rush Limbaugh into my thoughts. The first was yesterday’s NFL playoff win by the Philadelphia Eagles against the Green Bay Packers. Near the beginning of the season Limbaugh lost his job as a football commentator for ESPN because he expressed the opinion that Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb received favorable treatment from the press because the media wanted a black quarterback to succeed. Many interpreted Limbaugh’s remarks as racist and ESPN quickly had him out of the booth.
I never understood just exactly how these comments directed exclusively at the mostly white media qualified as racist. Nevertheless, I felt that Limbaugh should go because he clearly knows so little about football. You might have been able to make the above case twenty years ago but a black person playing quarterback these days is pretty routine. Also. I am from Syracuse where McNabb played his college ball and I watched him closely for four years. Anyone who cannot see what a special athlete McNabb is has no business being a football commentator. Of all current NFL quarterbacks he has the highest winning percentage. Yesterday’s game provided ample proof that the media can’t possibly treat McNabb too favorably. As a long time Syracuse and Donovan McNabb fan I say in your face Rush Limbaugh.
The second event, which brought Limbaugh to mind, was the results of an online poll conducted by Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). The vote on whether or not Limbaugh should see jail time for his illegal drug use came out with 66% of the over 9500 participants saying yes. Most of those who voted in this poll would consider themselves, as I do, part of for want of a better term the drug reform community. As a member of this community I find the results of this very distressing and in fact shameful.
If say Barney Frank found himself in a similar situation as Limbaugh and the DPA conducted a poll with the same question no more than 2 or 3% (if that many) would say that Frank should be jailed. Therefore, some 6000 people have said that Limbaugh should be punished just because he holds a particular political point of view. The principles of self-ownership and the right to alter one’s consciousness as one sees fit are completely thrown out merely because of whom Limbaugh is.
If the people in the drug reform movement want the Bush and future administrations to show compassion for those who run into difficulties with drugs should they not be setting a good example themselves?
I don't know if folks saw these two pieces by Virginia Postrel on Sunday. The
first is a long Boston Globe "ideas" piece on Hayek
that is very well done. There's a companion piece on Hayek and gay marriage here.
I post these not just because they are of possible interest but also because I'm
quoted in the gay marriage piece and in an odd sort of way. During a debate over
at The Corner on National Review Online, where several folks were saying Hayek
would oppose same-sex marriages, I sent an email to Jonah Goldberg arguing the
contrary. I hedged my phrasing to the right a bit, trying to make sure it got
mentioned, which it did. Well Virginia saw it there and then used it in her piece,
so now my hastily constructed and very hedged email language has appeared in a
major daily newspaper! The world of the Internet continues to be a wild and wacky
place. Excellent post by Arthur Silber here at L&P. I really do appreciate Kenneth M. Pollack's new discussion of the Iraq situation. It's better than what one reads from most of those on the "pro-war" side of this debate who are still trying to justify the means by the end of Hussein's reign, as if Hussein's regime was, in itself, an imminent threat to the security of the United States.
And yet, I couldn't help but be amused by this comment of Pollack's:
"Containment was failing"??? What a splendid failure! Where are the nuclear weapons, Mr. Pollack? Where are the tons of chemical and biological agents, Mr. Pollack? Where are the ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda, Mr. Pollack? Is it possible, Mr. Pollack, that "the threatening storm" was not actually in Iraq, after all?
The only thing that was failing was the Bush administration's intelligence. An oxymoron if ever there were one. Well, I had at first hoped that this entry would not have anything at all to do with politics. No such luck. Regulators appear to have entered the clinical insanity stage, seeking to control everything on earth -- including classical music.
As someone who has passionately loved classical music (and especially opera) all my life, I was intrigued by this NYT story about a phenomenon that has only begun receiving serious attention in the last few years: hearing loss among classical musicians. As the story says, many have noted this problem in the areas of pop and rock music, but it has been only recently that classical musicians have come in for the same kind of examination.
And now, especially in Europe, the government has, of course, come to the rescue of all those musicians who apparently are simply incapable of addressing these issues on their own:
The directive — issued last February and intended to protect all workers, orchestral musicians included — specifies a daily "upper exposure action value" of 85 decibels, amid a welter of other provisions. It acknowledges "the particular characteristics of the music and entertainment sectors." It allows discretion to member states to use averaging, specifying a weekly exposure limit of 87 decibels, and to allow a transition period for implementation.
Orchestras are just now beginning to figure out what effect it might have. Only mildly daunted, European orchestras are now working to find new solutions. The London Symphony, like many of its counterparts, has formed a "noise team," consisting of players from the various sections and a representative of the Barbican Center, the orchestra's home. It makes me wish that all government bureaucrats, wherever they may ply their wicked craft, would take the following oath from King Lear, with regard to the subject of regulation itself: "O, that way madness lies, let me shun that; no more of that."
But to be considerably more mundane, but realistic: fat chance.
The story has many more details, if the subject interests you. A friend just sent me this piece on Adobe including code in Photoshop that prevents users from copying and manipulating images of many of the world's major currencies, presumably to prevent counterfeiting. There are a couple of worrisome things here, including the state apparently requesting/demanding that such code be included in private software, and Adobe agreeing and not informing customers about it. In addition, it would seems to be a limit on free speech to the extent artists might like to use Photoshop to create artistic images that involved currency. (Not to mention the fact that manipulating the image of currency is not per se illegal.) But I'd like to make a point that I haven't seen raised elsewhere: once again, this whole situation
creates problems,and a bad precedent for state involvement, precisely because of the existence of state monopoly central banks. Where states control the currency, they will act in understandable ways to protect those monopoly rents, and presumably pressuring Adobe into doing this would be one of those ways. In a world of competitive banking, not only would banks have plenty of good reason to make their currencies hard to counterfeit (and banks did so historically, before central banking), they could also negotiate competitively with companies like Adobe to make these sorts of deals. Adobe would certainly be in a better position to resist where the power of the state is not involved, but rather the more decentralized forms of power we see in the market. Moreover, banks and/or software manufacturers could test the market to see whether customers really cared about an issue like this, or whether they were indifferent. The discovery processes of the market would both allow for more options and put more pressure on all parties concerned to be more forthcoming about what is and is not in their software. Steven Horwitz and Kevin Drum at Calpundit, via email, have responded to my post yesterday arguing that ex-felons should have both their second and fifteenth amendment rights restored.
In my view, Horwitz goes to the crux of the matter when he suggests that laws denying full legal and constitutional rights to ex-felons are more likely to arise in a punishment-based legal system. Under a restitution approach, by contrast, “someone who has paid their debt either literally or in time served, has made full restitution, and should start from a clean slate.” Horwitz raises a possible “hard case” objection, however. He asks whether crimes that are likely to be repeated, such as child molestation, deserve a clean slate?
Kevin Drum also puts forward a hard case argument. Although he agrees that there is “something to” my general argument that the second and fifteenth amendment rights of ex-felons should be restored, he adds: “Of course, denying guns to people who have use a gun to commit crimes in the past probably strikes most people as pretty reasonable. However, denying guns to some schmoe who was a drug addict ten years ago might not.”
It seems to me, as Horwitz indicates, that the best solution is a general one: a shift to a restitution-based legal system. Should such a system make exceptions for hard cases? I do not think so. In my view, the principle of the full restoration of rights should trump the possible exceptions mentioned by Drum and Horwitz.
Having said that, these and many other hard cases are really not really so problematic after all. A restitution-based legal system, which emphasizes full transparency, offers several possible solutions. Most importantly, it would facilitate the development of an information market on criminals and their crimes. Such a market would enable landlords, homeowners associations, creditors, schools, and potential crime victims to identify, and take precautions against, possible hard cases.
There is certainly precedent. Currently many states and localities release the new addresses of convicted child molesters who have been released. Why couldn’t this service be performed by the private sector? Of course, no system is perfect but it seems to me that one that enables the full restoration of rights is worth the relatively small price that must be paid in exchange.
As most people know, Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm was very influential in making and strengthening the case for war with Iraq. In that light, a few excerpts from Pollack's lengthy new article about the failures of our intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion are worth noting. First, this one about the area where Pollack does explicitly blame the administration for its behavior:
As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intelligence estimates that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to the time frame for Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon—the issue that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world. Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear weapon in five to seven years if it had to produce the fissile material indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a year if it could obtain the material from a foreign source. The intelligence community considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do so for twenty-five years with no luck. However, time after time senior Administration officials discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community's most likely scenario. ...
None of these statements in itself was untrue. However, each told only a part of the story—the most sensational part. These statements all implied that the U.S. intelligence community believed that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon within a year unless the United States acted at once.
Some defenders of the Administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defense attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client (even if the client is guilty). That is a false analogy. A defense attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The President is responsible for serving the entire nation. Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S. government—and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility. The war was not all bad. I do not believe that it was a strategic mistake, although the appalling handling of postwar planning was. There is no question that Saddam Hussein was a force for real instability in the Persian Gulf, and that his removal from power was a tremendous improvement. There is also no question that he was pure evil, and that he headed one of the most despicable regimes of the past fifty years. I am grateful that the United States no longer has to contend with the malign influence of Saddam's Iraq in this economically irreplaceable and increasingly fragile part of the world; nor can I begrudge the Iraqi people one day of their freedom. What's more, we should not forget that containment was failing. The shameful performance of the United Nations Security Council members (particularly France and Germany) in 2002-2003 was final proof that containment would not have lasted much longer; Saddam would eventually have reconstituted his WMD programs, although further in the future than we had thought. That said, the case for war—and for war sooner rather than later—was certainly less compelling than it appeared at the time. At the very least we should recognize that the Administration's rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we thought we knew in March of 2003. It appears even more reckless in light of what we know today. More about these issues, and about rumblings concerning Syria, in this post. Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?: "The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. "
This is old news. It's always useful to have someone working for you who's well-connected:
Ziad Ojakli, 36, has been working for the White House since January 2001. Most recently, he was a principal deputy for legislative affairs, serving as a liaison between Bush and the U.S. Senate. He will start working for Ford on Feb. 1.
"Ziad brings strong Washington experience to Ford, and I welcome him to the company," Ford Chairman and CEO Bill Ford said in a statement.
Ojakli arrives at a time when Ford and other U.S. automakers are seeking relief for their surging health care costs. A bill pending before Congress would put off for two years billions of dollars in contributions that companies owe to their pension plans. It also would extend some tax breaks.
Automakers also lobby on a variety of other issues, including safety regulations, fuel economy and foreign trade. In one discussion in Atlas, between industrialist Hank Rearden and his brother, there is this passage about the need for a "man in Washington":
But please do keep in mind that whatever this is, it ain't capitalism.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) [Note: this is the last in a four-part series arguing that libertarian interventionism is an oxymoron. For earlier posts, look immediately below]
Even if one believes that it’s moral to spill American blood and (forcibly extracted) American treasure to destroy evil regimes that do not threaten us, killing many of their innocent subjects in the process, one cannot embrace war-for-liberation without abandoning the libertarian’s skepticism about power. Libertarian interventionism—unlike libertarianism proper—depends upon a blithe trust in government’s competence and benevolence.
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to perform social engineering magic, transforming tribal despotisms into commercial republics. It’s surpassingly strange that many of the same people who think the federal government’s too ham-handed to run a retirement program, fight teen pregnancy or intelligently manage a war on poverty think the same government is capable of remaking whole societies and establishing limited, constitutional government and the rule of law where the necessary preconditions don't exist. (It would help, I suppose, if more than a handful of the nation-builders currently on staff spoke the nation’s language or even knew the alphabet.)
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to successfully manage the rights-maximization project abroad in the face of more uncertainty even than that which confronts a domestic central planner. The one certain thing about any war is that the unintended consequences vastly outweigh the intended ones. We can’t be sure that the bad unintended consequences will always outweigh the good, but the unplanned aftereffects of past crusades have been horrific enough to counsel against fighting unnecessary wars. Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, as he said in his 1917 war message to Congress, “to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life.” He ended up creating the conditions for a punitive peace that would help give rise to Adolph Hitler and the next “war to end all wars.”
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to remain faithful to the rights-maximization project across successive presidential administrations, and not warp the project to its own, unlibertarian ends. We ought to remember how quickly armed evangelism can turn into contempt when the objects of our charity resist. Speaking to a group of Methodist church leaders in 1899 President William McKinley explained his decision to annex the Philippines, saying he wanted “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.” Soon enough, the United States was embroiled in guerrilla warfare that killed some 200,000 objects-of-uplift. Mark Twain suggested that the new Filipino flag should copy the stars and stripes, but replace the white stripes with black and the stars with skull-and-crossbones. Is it so far-fetched to envision a similar shift occurring in our current struggle to liberalize Islamic theology through force-of-arms?
Finally, libertarian interventionists trust the government to restrain itself at home while it’s unleashed abroad. But an outlook that says it's our mission to overthrow tyrants, regardless of whether they threaten us, is a prescription for permanent war and a recipe for state empowerment. “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” wrote James Madison in 1795. As Robert Higgs documents in Crisis and Leviathan, today’s enormous administrative state is largely a product of power seized under claims of wartime necessity.
Perhaps there are no immutable laws of history; perhaps we can have a nightwatchman state with a half a trillion dollar defense budget—a government big enough to liberate the world, yet small enough to mind its business at home. But taking that bet would reflect the triumph of hope over experience.
Libertarian interventionism is an oxymoron. Libertarianism views the state, in Washington's phrase, as, “like fire… a dangerous servant and a fearsome master." As David Boaz has suggested, the libertarian's rules for government echo Smokey the Bear's rules for fire safety: keep it small, keep an eye on it and keep it contained. Libertarian interventionism sets government free, hoping liberty will emerge from the blaze. But once you've stopped viewing war as--like the state--a necessary evil, and started to view it as a force for good, you're well on your way to getting burned yourself.
Attacking regimes that don’t threaten us violates the libertarian prescription against the nondefensive use of force. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize states—to suggest that in the absence of a threat, attacking Iraq violates Iraq’s “rights.” “Iraq” is not a person and has no natural rights. But launching an assault against Iraq does violate individual rights on a massive scale. War--even modern war with laser-guided bombs and airdropped care packages--means rampant destruction and coercion. For that reason and others, libertarians have generally held that self-defense is the only legitimate reason for letting slip the dogs of war.
Even in a justified war of self-defense, innocents will die and rights will be trampled. In such a war—a necessary war—those deaths are unavoidable. If Saddam Hussein actually had the ability and the inclination to level an American city, then we'd have to regret the loss of innocent life, but recognize that we had no choice but to defend ourselves. We'd be in the position of the fellow in that "lifeboat ethics" scenario getting shot at by a madman with a machine gun in a crowd. We don't want to hit innocents when firing back, but in such cases, we’re following the first law of nature, self-preservation, and we didn't ask to be put in this situation.
In the case of nondefensive wars of liberation, however, we're making a very different moral choice. We're saying, let's kill this group of people, so that this other, larger group of people may be free. Now, if group A is made up solely of Baath party higher-ups, then that sounds like a fair trade: killing the guilty to free the innocent. But our munitions aren’t nearly that accurate. The Associated Press reported in June that over 3,000 Iraqi civilians died in the month-long war against the Baathist regime. Civilian body counts are, of course, subject to manipulation by activists and advocacy groups. But one thing is clear—even a just war is a terrible engine of destruction and a threat to innocent life.
If individuals have rights, and if there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights, then how can it be legitimate for the United States government to "collaterally damage" hundreds or thousands of Iraqi civilians into oblivion because of the benefits our action will confer on the survivors? Who anointed us the world's God-like utility-maximizer--empowered to stride across the globe extinguishing some innocent lives so that other innocents might flourish?
For libertarians, the first question of political philosophy is, why have a state at all? Can a coercive monopoly be justified, and if so, how? Non-anarchist libertarians usually follow Locke, Nozick, and the Declaration of Independence—answering that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Legitimate government, the argument goes, is a protective association founded on a social contract.
In the American context, you can identify that contract as the Constitution of 1789. Because of it, we Americans are pledged to assist each other in the defense of our liberties from enemies foreign and domestic. Reflecting the Lockean logic, the Constitution empowers the federal government to provide for “the common defense” of the United States, not the defense or liberation of oppressed people throughout the world.
Thus, when the North Koreans land in San Francisco, those of us on the East Coast can’t say to California—“tough break, but you’re on your own.” We’re part of a mutual protection pact requiring us to be there for the Californians so they’ll be there for us when legions of crack Eurotroopers descend on Washington, bent on forcing us to take a month’s vacation every year and drive around in poky little fuel-efficient cars. We Americans pay into a common system for our mutual protection. We’re all in it together, in that sense.
But we Americans are in a different position with regard to oppressed citizens of other countries. We are not pledged to defend their lives, liberty and property—they’re not part of the pact. Consider Iraq: assume for the sake of argument what appears to be the case, that the Baathist Regime was no threat to American national security. If so, then going to war to liberate Iraq was an act of foreign policy altruism, coercively funded, like all acts of state altruism. Altruistic war has no more justification than any more conventional foreign aid program. We can speak out against the crimes of an oppressive regime, we can urge our fellow citizens to give to the cause of the oppressed—we can even join libertarian Lincoln Brigades and march to war (right behind Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and other neoconservative hawks, no doubt). But taxing Americans or otherwise restricting their liberty in order to protect those outside of the social contract violates our fellow citizens’ rights.
You can answer, with Lysander Spooner, “what social contract? I never signed any contract.” Which is fair enough. But that doesn’t get you to a libertarian justification for altruistic regime change. If anything, it proves too much by implying that even taxing Americans for the defense of America is illegitimate—let alone taxing us for the liberation and transformation of the Middle East. Having debunked the moral foundation of even a limited state, the libertarian interventionist can’t go from there to arguing for a more ambitious form of government bent on spreading liberty abroad. He'll need another justification for the state, and other reasons to say that nondefensive war-to-spread-liberty is libertarian. And there are powerful reasons to think it's not, such as the non-aggression axiom [which I'll discuss in the next post].
Franklin Harris's recent post "Dictatress of the World" reminds me that I've been meaning to post an article I wrote a while back on the subject of libertarian interventionism. The article was for Liberty magazine which, sadly, doesn't have much of a web presence. But I'll put it up here, broken up into four medium-sized chunks. Here's the intro:
Despite the cliché, September 11th didn’t “change everything”; it did, however, change George W. Bush’s approach to foreign policy. On campaign trail 2000, Bush disparaged nation-building and called for a foreign policy based on the American national interest. But in the aftershock of 9/11, his administration embraced an ambitious set of foreign policy goals that goes far beyond eradicating the Al Qaeda threat. The National Security Strategy adopted by the Bush administration last year proclaims that “the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.” The war with Iraq, sold to the American people as a vital matter of national security, quickly morphed into “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” As evidence that Iraq had the means or the inclination to attack us has failed to surface, the administration has accordingly leaned ever more heavily on the benefits the war brought to the Iraqi people. And we now have 2,300 Marines poised off the coast of Liberia, where nothing resembling a national security interest presents itself.
Advocates and opponents of the new policy are calling it “imperialism,” but the irreplaceable Michael Kelly, killed in Iraq last April while working as an embedded reporter, coined a more accurate term. Kelly called the new approach “armed evangelism for the freedom of men.”
President Bush isn’t alone in his post-September 11th penchant for armed evangelism. Many libertarians are publicly and privately warming up to an aggressive foreign policy aimed at “building a free world sooner rather than later,” as Reason’s Ron Bailey puts it.
It’s not hard to understand why armed evangelism might appeal to libertarians, or to any friend of freedom. If we hold it to be a self evident truth that all men are created equal, then why should some men have their faces ground into the dirt based on accident of birth? Even if, like me, you’re convinced that Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States, you’d have to have a cold, dead heart not to thrill when the bastard’s statues came down.
But even though armed evangelism aims at the freedom of men, it’s not libertarian, and libertarians should be loathe to embrace it. It departs from the libertarian tradition in several important respects. I’ll trace several of those departures, in ascending order of significance.
And here I bet some people thought I was full of it when I posted excerpts from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly and her examination of the Vietnam disaster, and pointed to the similarities to the Iraq adventure in terms of the operative underlying principles. (And more Tuchman excerpts can be found here.)
Well, Ms. Tuchman is more than entitled to several dozen iterations of "I told you so," for any number of reasons. I see that Jim Henley approvingly quotes this comment at Hit & Run (a comment which concerns this new Kenneth Pollack article about intelligence failures with regard to Iraq, an article I haven't read yet):
We will all be right for sticking to conclusions we otherwise find reasonable, because what the article really demonstrates is that intellegence doesn't SETTLE any outstanding policy debate...in fact is scarcely even relevant.
If an issue of importance is out there, and a consequential choice needs to be made, a citizen can come to a sensible conclusion based on the sort of information available to any interested newspaper reader, and he will be as likely to choose correctly as any member of the National Security Council (or the equivalent policy-shaping body in another democratic society).
What Pollack's article demonstrates, is that a modern intellegence apparatus (and no one more than the US) can pile up mounds of data...which don't incontestably support any conclusion. You would be nearly as well off without any of it.
There is lots of data about the stock market. But nobody can call the market short-term, and nobody needs to, long-term (it will go up).
In a way this is reassuring. Debate over foreign policy choices (or any other policy choices) in a modern democracy can proceed among citizens, based mostly on information citizens can reasonably be expected to have. In fact, in my first post of excerpts from The March of Folly, I quoted Tuchman on the Fulbright hearings on Vietnam in early 1966, in large part on precisely this point. Here is the relevant part of that passage:
Though he could bring out the major issues, Fulbright was a teacher, not a leader, unready himself to put his vote where it counted. When a month after the hearings the Senate authorized $4.8 billion in emergency funds for the war in Vietnam, the bill passed against only the two faithful negatives of Morse and Gruening. Fulbright voted with the majority.
The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, "We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against." This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. "Foreign policy decisions," concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, "are in general much more influenced by irrational motives" than are domestic ones. That is, assuming that we do ever absorb them, an achievement which seems far beyond the capabilities of virtually all our political leaders at the moment.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) In reading Drudge's latest Paul O'Neill "breaking scandal" report, I was most struck by the final line:
Well, good luck to him. He'll need it. The major focus of the Drudge Report item is this:
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap," says O'Neill.
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind. Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall, including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil. "There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'" A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says. And in 1997, in its Statement of Principles, PNAC said this:
Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
-- we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
-- we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
-- we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
-- we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles. But in a culture which prefers its story lines presented in a simple, connect-the-dots fashion -- where most people prefer to believe that we are now only reacting to the attacks of 9/11, and we had to go into Iraq because...well, he was a bad guy, too, maybe he wasn't the same bad guy who attacked us on 9/11, but bad guys have gotta go, you know, and anyway it's sort of in the same general area, and he was sort of the same kind of person -- I suspect that most people probably aren't familiar with all this background.
And most people don't want to hear the truth. So I would advise Mr. O'Neill to prepare himself. He's in for a very bumpy ride.
WELL: That didn't take long:
In fact, a senior administration official tells CBS News it would have been irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise.
Another senior administration official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?" I see that Keith Halderman has noted Walter Williams' correction of an error Williams made in a recent column, about the Merv Grazinski "urban legend."
I have commented on Williams' remarks myself -- but as I go on to note, Williams made a much more serious, and much more offensive, mistake in the same earlier column. Williams relied on bogus statistics with regard to gay life expectancy, to argue that life insurance companies ought to be able to ask applicants if they are homosexual, supposedly because gays are likely to die at much younger ages than heterosexuals. These statistics have long since been debunked, and it saddens me greatly that while Williams will acknowledge one of his errors, he still has failed to deal with the much graver one. It saddens me, but unfortunately does not surprise me.
I discussed all of this in more detail, with supporting information, shortly after Williams' initial column on this subject appeared, here. Just a quick response to David's post from
earlier: isn't the denial of rights to ex-felons a good example of a punishment approach to law-breaking as opposed to a restitution approach? If one sees the legal system as inflicting punishment, then refusing to allow ex-felons to vote or own guns might make sense. However, if one thinks in terms of restitution, then someone who has paid their debt, either literally or in time served, has made full restitution and should start with a clean slate. (Whether or not the logic of "starting" with a clean slate" applies to all ex-felons is an interesting question. Are there some crimes that are likely to be repeated even after time is served, e.g., child molestation? If so, is it so easy to assume the "clean slate"?) Kevin Drum at Calpundit states the case for restoring the voting rights of ex-felons. I agree. I have always regarded a life-time denial of fifteenth amendment rights simply because of a one-time felony, such as owning or selling cocaine, as an insidious form of double jeopardy.
According to Drum, depriving ex-felons of the franchise is also “intentionally or not...seriously racist. Because of the disparity in sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine, a much larger percentage of blacks get convicted on drug charges [and thus lose the franchise] than whites.” Again, I agree.
This raises a question, however. Why limit the restoration of ex-felon rights to the fifteenth amendment? Why not restore their second amendment rights as well? Unfortunately, many states routinely prohibit ex-felons from owning guns. If Drum is right about the racist implications of laws denying ex-felons the vote (and I think he is), the logic of his argument also applies to laws prohibiting them the right to own guns. Because blacks are more likely to live in high-crime areas, these laws disproportionately deprives them of a means of self-defense.
A conversation on a Usenet group brought up an observation I've noted about the classical liberal/libertarian movement that has persisted over the course of the now more than 20 years I've been involved. There are, and have been, a goodly number of prominent gay men in both the academic and policy sides of the movement for many, many years, and the Libertarian Party has had a gay rights plank and gay men involved for many years as well. And in the more recent past, there's been a flourishing of openly gay conservative men. All this is to the good I think. But it raises an interesting question: why don't we see many (any?) prominent libertarian lesbians? Now perhaps they are there and I just don't know about them, and if so, mea culpa, and please don't name names! Still, given the increasing numbers of libertarian women in the academic, policy, and political worlds, it's surprising that open lesbians remain so few in number or at least so far below the radar. Obviously, I'm not trying to out people, but it is curious and the real question to me is whether or not there's something about the way libertarianism is couched, or about the underlying ideas (perhaps maybe the focus on rights?) that makes it far more attractive to homosexual men than women. I'm also not interested in launching a recruiting drive; nonetheless, it remains a fascinating question about the culture of the libertarian movement and the broader culture as well. (I also think a parallel argument can be made about the conservative movement.) It's the question of "why" that I find fascinating. Of course I may start hearing that I need to check my premise here! If my initial assumption is wrong, I'm happy to hear about it. Back on December 2nd I had to apologize for previously posting the bogus Stella Awards, including the urban legend of Merv Grazinski, in this space and I still consider myself to have let the Blog down. But, after reading Thursday’s Washington Times I do not feel quite so bad anymore. It seems one of my hero’s Walter Williams made the same mistake and he too had to admit a lack of due diligence. In his column he points out that 40 or 50 years ago no one in their right mind would have found such things believable.
Williams goes on to give some examples of true stories concerning unjust lawsuits that seem to my mind to be almost as fantastic as the made up ones. He then writes, ”What is common to all of them is the absolution or the attempt at absolution from personal responsibility. Are people to be held responsible for their actions? In the case of tobacco use, it's not the smoker who is responsible for his illness, it's tobacco companies. In the case of obesity, it's not the individual, but fast-food companies and food manufacturers who are responsible. It's the same with criminal violence — the gun manufacturer is partly to blame. What does all this say for the future of our nation?”
However, the notion that individuals are not responsible for their own actions goes back quite a bit further in our history then 40 or 50 years. The idea that black people are either childlike or brutish and therefore cannot control themselves was along with the need to convert them to Christianity one of the two pillars of the ante-bellum pro-slavery argument. Also, much of the Progressive Era reforms had as their central tenet an absolution of personal responsibility. People were not responsible for their own economic well being, therefore various means of income redistribution had to be attempted. People were not responsible for their own behavior when they used alcohol or took certain kinds of drugs, therefore the disease model of drug use and prohibition came to the forefront.
When Williams talks about drive to blame tobacco companies and fast food franchises for the problems of those who use their products he is in reality speaking about a modern day extention of the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs. Though the seedy looking dope dealer lurking around the schoolyard has been replaced by Ronald McDonald, the underlying philosophy is the same.
That Walter Williams would leave the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs off of his above list of the ways in which personal responsibility is being avoided did not surprise me. I have long noticed a pronounced tendency by black conservative intellectuals such as Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Alan Keyes to avoid the subject of illegal drugs. I have never read anything by Williams on the topic and only thing I have seen by Sowell, that comes close, was a recent column in support of mandatory minimum sentencing. In this piece he argued that those who steal or do violence to others should be sent anyway for a long time. Although, he failed to mention that those kinds of inmates are almost always not the ones subject to mandatory minimum prison terms. In fact the felons Sowell is concerned with are sometimes let out early to make room for the kinds of prisoners serving mandatory sentences, drug law violators who have harmed no one else’s person or property. When pressed on the point Alan Keyes will respond by saying that the illegal drugs enslave their users and that he cannot support slavery, completely oblivious to the fact that he is suggesting that we free these so called slaves by putting them in prison.
If I had it in my power to command the above three conservatives to read two books they would be Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes, In Defense of Drug Use and Jeffery Schaler's Addiction Is a Choice, then maybe they would lend their powerful voices to ending the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs. Because, if we want to return America to a nation and a culture where the individual is held responsible for his or her own actions ending that war is a necessary first step.
I just posted an essay about the Bush administration's cultivation of fear and dependence, by means of both their language and their actions. Here is the conclusion:
But this ongoing "crisis" atmosphere provides many benefits to the administration. As the Spiked article points out, it gets the administration off the hook of blame: we can't say they didn't warn us, even if they didn't do so in any meaningful way. It makes people more likely to believe that those in the administration are genuinely concerned about our safety and well-being (which many individuals in the administration undoubtedly are, even if their methods are mistaken). But perhaps most importantly -- and most dangerously -- it makes the general citizenry look to the government for protection, for action, for the continuation of life itself.
In short: it makes the populace look to the government, in a crucial psychological sense, as their savior. It is the government that will protect us from any and all threats; it is the government that will take any required action; and it is only the government that can be trusted to do all of this, and thus to ensure our very survival. In this kind of atmosphere, it becomes much easier for the government to clamp down on "dissent," should it choose to do so at some point -- and the overall cultural atmosphere already significantly discourages dissenting views. If there is another terrorist attack, or more than one, here in the United States, this is precisely the kind of atmosphere that could easily lead to censorship in some form.
And beyond censorship, which it should be remembered is a requirement for any dictatorship, this is the kind of atmosphere which enables a government to gather increasingly more power unto itself. Recall how quickly the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11 -- and how most legislators had not even bothered to read it. But to vote against it would have been viewed as disloyalty, and perhaps even treason. An atmosphere of this kind does not lend itself to considered, measured judgment -- and disagreements are quickly condemned as emanating from a "fifth column."
For these reasons, the use of language by Bush and others -- in terms of what it reveals about their overall approach, and in terms of the possibilities it creates for further encroachments on our liberties -- is of great significance, especially when viewed in combination with their actions, and its importance should not be underestimated.
Finally, consider the following. I am speaking in very general terms here, but one of the key differences between the view of many Europeans with regard to their relationship to their government, and to the state, and that of most Americans had been that Europeans viewed themselves as belonging to the state in a crucial way: that the government knows best, and that their individual fates and well-being were inextricably bound up with the health, and power, of the state itself. In this sense, they were creatures of the state, both psychologically and in terms of the state's dominance over the individual lives of its citizens.
But that had not been a typical American's view of his relationship to his government. An American viewed the government as existing to do his bidding, to serve him. Certainly there were functions the government performed that he couldn't individually -- but fundamentally, his life was his own, and the government had little to say about how he led it. But over the last several decades (beginning in the 1960s to a significant degree, although the roots of this phenomenon were present as early as the World War I era, and even before), that perspective has changed significantly. And now, an American looks to government to protect his financial well-being, to care for him in times of trouble, and to regulate any number of his activities, no matter how little they may impringe on others. Thus, a typical American has now become largely dependent, rather than independent. And in this way, Americans have become more and more "Europeanized."
It is this kind of cultural atmosphere, and this kind of psychological outlook, that allows for the growth of an increasingly authoritarian government, particularly in a time of crisis, whether real or manufactured (or some combination of both). It is this kind of culture that allows for the growth, in time and if the course is not halted and reversed, of a dictatorship.
This is why these issues matter so much -- and why our present cultural climate is so filled with danger. It is a phenomenon that we should all be on guard against, and fight against in every way we can. Freedom unquestionably does require continual, unceasing vigilance, against both foreign and domestic enemies, and even against those domestic enemies who say they are only "protecting" us -- and that has never been truer than at the present moment.
You can read the entire essay here. Well, I guess this is something of a historical irony. It's certainly not everyday that you see New Englanders linking secession to the ideas of the Founders and colonial times. I thought that troublesome little idea got lost somewhere back during the 1860s, you know during another famous "armed insurrection type thing" (to use VT's Secretary of State's peculiar turn of phrase).
It's also worth noting that the attempted secession of well-known resort towns in Vermont can't be good news for Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Last September, nearly 70 percent of Alabama’s voters rejected a proposed 1.2 billion dollar tax increase. Did this end the matter? Of course not. Supporters of higher taxes have been even more persistent than Freddy and Jason. A group of them has asked a federal judge to require the legislature to throw out the property tax system and replace it with a system which, of course, will raise taxes.
According to the Tuscaloosa News , the key complaint of those behind this latest effort is that the unwashed masses keep getting in the way: “One law that Blacksher [an attorney for the plaintiffs] said prevents Alabama from having an adequate tax system is the constitutional requirement that voters must approve all property tax increases. He said over the past 10 years, voters have turned down about 70 percent of all attempts by local governments to raise property taxes.”
Sean T. Collins continues to be puzzled by libertarian anti-interventionism, writing in his blog:
So, I ask, what exactly is supposed to be libertarian about reducing freedom at home in order (maybe) to increase it abroad?
Of course, this is the best case scenario. It assumes that the U.S. actually can, in the long term, increase freedom around the world in the top-down fashion that Sean endorses. I doubt it. Peter Jennings reported on ABC "World News Tonight" that Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged today that he has seen "no smoking gun or concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Last February, Mr. Powell told the United Nations that Iraq was harboring terrorists with ties to Osama Bin Laden and warned of a sinister nexus between Iraq and the terrorist network."
So, let's see: A 400-member military team of weapons inspectors has been withdrawn by the Bush administration because there are no discernible weapons of mass destruction. There is "no smoking gun" linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. But the world is safe for democracy now that Saddam Hussein has been deposed, even though Hussein was never an imminent threat to American security.
Of course, "we" actually have to build this "democracy" with a recipe that includes big helpings of crony capitalism and even bigger helpings of US taxpayer dollars.
Oh, uh, nine more troops were killed in another Black Hawk Down incident in Falluja, and a transport plane carrying 63 passengers was hit with a surface-to-air missile out of the Baghdad airport.
While Queen Elizabeth II christened the Queen Mary II today, Iraq is starting to feel more and more like the Titanic. The media made much of President Bush’s “axis of evil” -- much as administration “spinners” had hoped. The excessive demonization of the admittedly autocratic Iran, North Korea, and Iraq allowed the administration to build public support for an aggressive invasion of Iraq as well as hard-line policies toward these “rogue” states. But a more appropriate moniker might be “axis of exaggeration.” The Bush administration has failed to find unconventional (nuclear, biological and chemical) weapons in Iraq or to provide convincing evidence that the crude and limited super weapons programs in any of these three nations actually constitute a threat to a superpower half a world away. Perhaps as shocking as the administration’s exaggeration of the threat from these three “rogues,” is the unacknowledged real danger posed by snuggling up to “friendly” despotic countries -- Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- the Bush administration’s “axis of expediency.”
Pakistan, a U.S. “friend,” may be the most dangerous country on the planet. It is believed to have between 24 and 48 nuclear weapons -- as opposed to North Korea’s estimated handful -- that could easily fall into the hands of radical Islamists if the unstable government of Pervez Musharraf falls. The two recent assassination attempts against him -- perhaps with the support of elements of the Pakistani military -- make this a real possibility. Although Kim Jong Il of North Korea, is quirky and unpredictable, he is unlikely to pass such weapons on to terrorists that can’t be deterred -- the biggest threat facing the United States. North Korea has not been actively sponsoring terrorist attacks since the 1980s. The same cannot be said of Pakistani radicals, who are more likely to pass nuclear weapons on to radical Islamic terror groups, such as al Qaeda.
In fact, we cannot be totally certain that some members of the current Pakistani government have not helped Islamic terrorists, willing to pay, on nuclear matters. Parts of the Pakistani government -- which supported the radical Islamists against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the subsequent Taliban government there until September 11 -- still have close connections to the Islamist movement. Musharraf, trying to win the support of Pakistani Islamists, has been lukewarm on cracking down on al Qaeda in Pakistan. Reports continue to emerge about Pakistan as the proliferator of nuclear expertise -- helping North Korea, Iran and Libya in their quest for such weapons. The Pakistani nuclear program even had a brochure advertising its nuclear weapons technology to aspiring nuclear states and middlemen. How do we know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of that program who is anti-Western, is not also peddling nuclear expertise, technology and materials to radical Islamic terrorists groups? Yet despite Pakistan’s bad behavior over the years, the United States has supported, even aided, autocratic Pakistani governments.
The governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt are also corrupt, tyrannies that likely have unconventional weapons programs, commit gross human rights abuses against their people and have therefore spawned radical Islamic terrorists. The leaders of al Qaeda came from those two countries. At minimum, the Saudis fund radical Islamic schools in Pakistan and other places that churn out potential terrorists. Some Saudis may even fund specific terror attacks. Yet the United States looks the other way because of the perceived need for Saudi oil (no matter that the Saudis have little else to export and thus have little incentive to hold their oil off the world market). Similarly, Secretary of State Colin Powell recently chose to praise the tyrannical dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and soft-pedal any criticism. Unbeknownst to most Americans, U.S. support for these two corrupt, authoritarian regimes is the primary force energizing radical Islamists -- such as Osama bin Laden -- to attack American targets.
The Bush administration’s rhetorical justifications for invading Iraq (after the threat from Iraq’s unconventional weapons was debunked) were to end a brutal regime and set an example to inspire the “democratization” of the Middle East. But continued Bush administration support for equally brutal, but “friendly,” regimes reveals the hypocrisy of those justifications and the emptiness of the administration’s goal of spreading democracy.
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*Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA., and author of the book, Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org.
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The Stupid Party and the Evil Party (which one's which again?) want the fuzz to pull you over if you're not buckled up. Hillary! Clinton and John Warner are cosponsoring a bill that will push the states to adopt "primary enforcement" seat belt laws. As Eric Peters explains on the American Spectator site today: "Primary enforcement means the police can screech out of alleyways, turn on their sirens and pull you over, hands on their guns, spotlight in your face -- simply for failing to wear your seat belt."
What's also disgusting is the Hillary-in-S & M-gear graphic that graces the Spectator front page today. Mmmm: thanks for that image, guys. University administrators do not react to criticism with argument and reason -- generally because they have none -- but with further deployment of administrative rules. You've heard of the "fog of war." This is the fog of officialdom, the pernicious off-spring of early 20th century progressivism and, ironically, the means once intended to protect us from the arbitrary exercise of power.
Case in point: David Beito and I have criticized the University of Alabama for failing to address, and then attempting to cover up, rampant grade inflation. Administrators do not like us. So what did they do?
Two things, and neither included argument or reason. First, they claimed that only "recognized" faculty groups could use campus mail to distribute their views. Recognized? What does that mean, we said. There was no answer, except to suggest that if they like you, you're "recognized." This is how the Chinese government operates. We pressed the administrators on this, and demonstrated, we think, that the power they claimed was not properly exercised by them but by the faculty itself.
Then came the second thing. OK, they said, even if you are recognized, postal regulations prohibt you from sending you newspaper, The Alabama Observer, through faculty mail. "Postal regulations?" we asked. You've got to be kidding! They weren't. Within 28 hours, the admnistration of the University of Alabama had banned our paper and the paper of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The Federalist Society, by the way, had already been banned when David Bernstein came to speak and the administration refused to publicize his Federalist-sponsored lecture.
Faculty, unbelievably, were nonplussed. Hey, so what if the principle of free speech had been violated? At least unnamed and unidentified "postal regulations" had been protected. And best of all, they thought, reactionary faculty conservatives had been prevented from communicating their ideas.
The faculty will eventually realize that this is a sword that cuts both ways. But in the meantime, the administration has won -- not by being "right," of course, but by throwing up incomprehensible rules and procedures, all designed to conceal the unprincipled use of power and cover the admnistrative posterior.
As I've said before, and will say again, the ONLY way to confront this kind of problem (short of a firing squad) is with mandatory term limits for university administrators. Courtesy of Matthew Bargainer , we learn that Joseph Schumpeter, best known for his theory of "creative destruction," opposed intervention in World War II.
I saw this
piece from the Manchester Union-Leader on Wes Clark and couldn't help but notice this comment: The retired four-star general said he will discern a prospective judge's position on abortion not with a litmus test, but by reading his previous decisions to ensure that the judge has never upset existing judicial precedent. "I don't believe people whose ideological agenda is to burn the
law or remake the law or reshape it should be appointed whether they are from either side,"; he said during an interview with editors and a reporter. "I just want good, solid people with judicial temperament who respect the process of law that we have in America." Does he really mean, abortion aside, that he'll only appoint people who never upset precedent? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't a key part of a judge's job to discern whether new circumstance produce good reasons for new law? After all, precedents came from somewhere. Doesn't respecting "the process of law" include recognizing that sometimes precedent is wrong? Too bad the reporter didn't ask him if his view suggests that the judges who comprised the majority in Lawrence v. Texas should be removed from the bench! Seems to me this view of judges is itself a dangerous precedent. I try to keep an eye out for good quotations in my day-to-day law practice. Today, I just happened to come across an excellent passage in a case written by Justice Scalia, and I thought I'd share it with the L&P readership.
This excerpt may come in handy in some common debates between liberals, libertarians and conservatives for the following reasons. 1) It serves as a nice defense against critics of Justice Scalia who think that the good Justice reflexively panders to the every need and desire of law enforcement, and 2) it is a well-crafted statement of concern about the War on Drugs' lasting effect on consititutional liberties.
The following quotation comes from Treasury Employees v. Von Raab. It's also worth noting, that Scalia is writing here in dissent, joined (oddly enough) by Justice Stevens.
There is only one apparent basis that sets the testing at issue here apart from all these other situations - but it is not a basis upon which the Court is willing to rely. I do not believe for a minute that the driving force behind these drug-testing rules was any of the feeble justifications put forward by counsel here and accepted by the Court. The only plausible explanation, in my view, is what the Commissioner himself offered in the concluding sentence of his memorandum to Customs Service employees announcing the program: "Implementation of the drug screening program would set an important example in our country's struggle with this most serious threat to our national health and security." App. 12. Or as respondent's brief to this Court asserted: "[I]f a law enforcement agency and its employees do not take the law seriously, neither will the public on which the agency's effectiveness depends." Brief for Respondent 36. What better way to show that the Government is serious about its "war on drugs" than to subject its employees on the front line of that war to this invasion of their privacy and affront to their dignity? To be sure, there is only a slight chance that it will prevent some serious public harm resulting from Service employee drug use, but it will show to the world that the Service is "clean," and - most important of all - will demonstrate the determination of the Government to eliminate this scourge of our society! I think it obvious that this justification is unacceptable; that the impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point; that symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.
There is irony in the Government's citation, in support of its position, of Justice Brandeis' statement in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928) that "[f]or good or for ill, [our Government] teaches the whole people by its example." Brief for Respondent 36. Brandeis was there dissenting from the Court's admission of evidence obtained through an unlawful Government wiretap. He was not praising the Government's example of vigor and enthusiasm in combatting crime, but condemning its example that "the end justifies the means," 277 U.S., at 485 . An even more apt quotation from that famous Brandeis dissent would have been the following:
"[I]t is . . . immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Id., at 479.
Those who lose because of the lack of understanding that be-got the present exercise in symbolism are not just the Customs Service employees, whose dignity is thus offended, but all of us - who suffer a coarsening of our national manners that ultimately give the Fourth Amendment its content, and who become subject to the administration of federal officials whose respect for our privacy can hardly be greater than the small respect they have been taught to have for their own. According to an article Sunday in the Duluth News Tribune, the proposed Minnesota social studies standards would greatly increase the scope of what Duluth high school students would study. Says one teacher,
"If you don't know the names and the dates, well that's OK if you can understand the significance of, say, the Civil War, and how the ramifications are affecting current history." UPDATE: In a comment on this post at SCSU Scholars, David Foster notes this false dichotomy: The Washington Post reports that "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper." WMD hunter David Kay "declined to be interviewed."
Meanwhile, someone claiming to be Osama Bin Laden continues to spread disinformation about Al Qaeda's alliance with Saddam Hussein, calling the deposed Iraqi dictator the Gulf states' "comrade in treason and agentry to the United States."
I suppose Dubya’s whiz kids in Iraq will soon be favorably quoting the works of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. From today’s Wall Street Journal :
"U.S. advisers and Iraqi oil officials, now studying how to organize Iraq's vast but dilapidated oil industry, are leaning heavily toward recommending the formation of a large state-run petroleum company. If adopted, the move could sharply curtail the role of international oil corporations for years.
Officials of the U.S.-led occupation have been pushing liberalization in most parts of the Iraqi economy. But in the politically sensitive oil sector, occupation advisers say they strongly support establishing a state-owned company similar to those in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
U.S. and Iraqi oil officials say they believe such a model can attract the massive foreign investment the industry needs. But international companies have been stymied by other state-controlled oil producers in the region, where political sensitivities about foreign interference in the oil sector have kept them out."
I received this little tidbit this morning from the list serve of Historians Against the War:
In his 1998 book, A World Transformed, George H.W. Bush describes his reason for not going after Saddam at the end of the first Gulf
war: "Extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq . . . would
have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would
have been forced to occupy Baghdad . . . [and] rule Iraq. . . . Under
those circumstances there would have been no viable exit strategy . .
. the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land." My blog quoting an article from The New York Times showing that the richest 400 Americans give a higher percentage of their incomes to charity than other Americans has provoked some comments from our friends at Cliopatria. Here is what I quoted:
"The top 400 American earners in 2000 provided nearly 7 percent of all the charitable gifts reported on income tax returns for that year, well in excess of their roughly 1 percent share of overall income, according to data released yesterday by the NewTithing Group, a charity that tracks giving.
"The 400 taxpayers with the highest reported incomes in 2000 made an average of $174 million and gave away, on average, $25.3 million that year. Their combined giving totaled $10.1 billion, or 6.9 percent, of the $146 billion in charitable donations that Americans deducted on their income tax returns in 2000.”
Jonathan Dresner thinks that this measure is only “marginally useful” because it does measure charitable giving as a percentage of total wealth rather than just income. He also does not find the comparison to be helpful because “most” of the richest Americans could live off principle and not go broke for the foreseeable future. That is why we have progressive taxation...”
Ralph Luker expresses surprise that anyone would be impressed by these figures. He continues: “it wouldn’t take much to show that wealthy Americans use philanthropy, with all of its tax breaks fro them, to persuade middle income Americans proportionately to contribute more to sustain the general welfare in the private sectors.”
I have a several thoughts and questions but, for now, will limit myself to these. Dresner and Luker quibble with the validity of the figures. Fair enough. Does this mean that they believe that the richest 400 are not giving enough? If so, how much should they give? What percentage of giving would impress them as sufficient?
A interesting quirk in Ayn Rand's theory of property creation seems to have major implications for the concept of intellectual property and may explain why libertarians are somewhat divided on the issue.
Rand seems to go to great lengths to distance her theory from John Locke's, trying to avoid the idea that mixing one's labor with an unowned resource transforms that resource into owned property. Instead, Rand always speaks of property as the "product of man's mind," not his physical labor.
Now, in most cases, this is a trivial distinction. Obviously, all physical labor is driven by thought; we are not zombies. But the distinction does become relevant when you think of intellectual property: music, stories, movies, etc. Because in a very real sense, Rand sees all property as intellectual property. A poem is as much a product of "intellectual labor" as is a building.
This, I think, helps explain why Objectivists are, among libertarian-minded folks, the ones most inclined toward the legitimacy of intellectual property, while libertarians who get their property theory straight from Locke (or from Locke via Nozick or Rothbard) tend to view "intellectual property" as suspect, as not really property at all, because it lacks any tangible existence.
For my part, I tend to side with the pure Lockeans, but I think Randians may find this an interesting area to explore. Over at my blog, Franklin's Findings, I have linked to a debate which has arisen between a few comic-book writers and the fans who buy their comics. Long story short, a couple of writers are complaining that those fans who prefer to wait for publishers like Marvel Comics and DC Comics to issue trade-paperback collections are destroying the market for 22-page monthly comic books.
Now, why do I bring this up here, you ask?
This seems to me like yet another example of artists not grasping economics and insisting that the market adjust to what the artists want to produce rather than the artists producing what the market wants to buy. And in this case, we're not even talking about artistic content, just the format in which it is delivered to consumers.
It is no wonder, as Mises observed, that so many artists are anti-capitalistists. Listening to the radio news as I drove into work, I heard Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge admit that when asked by the president if he would want a member of his family to fly he answered, "no." Yet Ridge and the rest of the Bush Administration urge all of us to go about our business, lest our inaction cause the economy to tank in the middle of an election year. My apologies if my html is bad in this first post. I just wanted to post a quick hello and to thank you all for inviting me on board. I've been a reasonably regular reader for the last few months and have enjoyed your contributions. It's particularly nice to be here with several folks I know (Dave, Don, Chris, Sheldon) and others (such as Rod, Gene, and King) who I've met briefly over the years. King may not remember when we met - I interviewed for a job at SCSU back in 89 and didn't get an offer. (I won't hold that against him though.) The links Chris provided give you a good sense of my professional and not-so-professional life. In addition to what's there, I have a current interest in issues of gender and family, having taught both economics and first-year seminar courses on the topics for several years. I think family issues are particularly challenging ones for classical liberals and libertarians, and find exploring them to be
endlessly fascinating. I also love TV and rock music, and am always on the lookout for ways to link those topics to my more academic and political interests. Finally, as a result of spending the last 15 years at a liberal arts college, I'm very interested in issues of pedagogy, from the nitty-gritty of how you teach first-year students to write a substantial research paper, to the role of technology in higher education, to issues of political correctness and ideology in the classroom. One last word: now that I've gone over to the dark side as a half to full-time administrator, I'm particularly grateful to be part of this group, as I need all the opportunities to engage in this sort of give-and-take that I can find. Thanks again for having me. Substance will follow. I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome to the Liberty and Power Group Blog our newest participant: Steven Horwitz. Steven is Associate Dean of the First Year, and Interim Director at the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Professor of Economics, at St. Lawrence University. You can find out more about Steve here. Speaking personally, I'd like to say that he is one of my favorite hot-shot radical libertarian-Austrian-school thinkers, and also has a terrific page on the rock band, Rush. In fact (start shameless plug), he recently published a provocative paper on "Rand, Rush, and the De-totalization of the Utopianism of Progressive Rock," for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, for which I am a founding co-editor (/end shameless plug).
Welcome aboard, Steve! ... what a beautiful, beautiful name. Okay, so maybe I don't like Barbra Streisand's politics, but I really liked the movie "Funny Girl." So sue me. Omar Sharif, the "Hello Gorgeous" Egyptian-Lebanese actor who played Fanny Brice's husband in the film, has shown that he's also pretty astute on Middle Eastern affairs. (Perhaps he learned a thing or two when he played Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish in "Lawrence of Arabia"...)
At the Capri-Hollywood Film & Music Festival, Sharif criticized the Bush administration for attempting to impose democracy in Iraq. "The moment the troops leave," he said, "that culture will return to its old tribal governing ways." He adds that if Bush "went to Iraq to achieve a democracy, he was wrong. If he went to Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong, because there never were any."
Sharif likes the idea that a tyrant was removed from Iraq, but he asks: "So many tyrants in this world, why this one? There is more reason to attack North Korea. And Pakistan has the atomic bomb."
Who said actors know nothing about international politics? I have been skimming Conrad Black’s tome, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom . Many rightwingers have praised it including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr., and David Frum. Frum calls it a “great book – in my opinion, the single best, most useful, and most though-provoking biography we have of one of the most important presidents of the 20th century.”
Are we reading the same book? Thus far, I have seen little new or original in Black’s account that was not first said many years ago by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. For example, Black, like Schlesinger subscribes to the thesis that Roosevelt “saved” capitalism from itself and thus preserved it and American democracy from the extremes of fascism and communism. This always seemed to me to be a dubious claim. American voters were mad as hell in 1932 but I have not seen any persuasive evidence that they were ripe for a fascist or communist revolution.
Did they want a "third way" in the form of a statist New Deal? It is hard to say but FDR certainly did not present it to them that year. He talked out of both sides of his mouth promising to maintain the gold standard, cut the budget by 25 percent, while, at the same time, making vague pledges to "do something" for the unemployed. Hence, he could win the enthusiastic support of such diverse figures as H.L. Mencken, Stuart Chase, Henry Wallace, and Harry Byrd.
I have little to add to the insightful reviews of Jim Powell , Alex Tabarrok on the substance of the book.
I will wait to read more before making broader conclusions. Perhaps there is more here than meets the eye.
For me, the most interesting question is a sociological one: why have conservative pundits been so loud in their praise of this book? To what extent are these kudos related to a post-Cold War trend among many conservatives (and libertarians) to embrace a Herculean view of the American state in foreign policy? Has their love affair with the state intervention in foreign affairs led them to take a more benign view of state intervention in domestic policy? More later....
[cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
The announcement that Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi has agreed to give up his quest for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and submit to inspections raises two questions. First, has Gadaffi promised to turn Libya into a democracy? If so, I missed that part of the news release. The Bush doctrine isn’t supposed to be simply about “weapons of mass destruction.” It’s also purportedly about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Second, in Libya’s case President Bush is content to forgo regime change and settle for inspections. But why? Gadaffi is not a nice guy. He has run a brutal regime for a long time. He was involved in the horrible Pan Am 103 bombing over Scotland, which killed hundreds of innocent people. If inspections are a satisfactory safeguard with Libya, why weren’t they so with Iraq? Or does Bush hold a regime-change card up his sleeve?
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith offers what strikes me as an extremely insightful discussion of the role of utilitarian arguments in moral thinking. I often find myself trying to remember or paraphrase this passage, so I finally hunted it down (a process made easier by the Liberty Fund search tool). It's at II. ii. 22-23:
I've been having a running online debate over anarchism with Robert Bidinotto; he maintains that the rule of law depends on the existence of a "final arbiter" in society, whereas I maintain that the rule of law not only does not require, but is actually incompatible with, such a final arbiter. For those who are interested, here are the relevant links:
Director Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy has put New Zealand on the moviemaking map, resulting in millions of dollars being pumped into the Kiwi economy, with Jackson still set to film his "King Kong" remake there. But the obvious economic benefit to the country isn't enough for one of the nation's politicians, who still complains about the size of tax breaks New Zealand gives filmmakers. And Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen dares ask how much more Jackson wants? The better question is, how much more does Cullen want?
This is typical of the political class' way of thinking, which sees tax breaks as subsidies, as if all money belongs to the state. I sure wish we could get beyond this dishonest, debate-squelching notion that "neocon" is a code-word for "Jew." Folks on the political Right, veterans all of campus affirmative action debates where ideological opposition automatically prompts charges of racism, ought to know better than to engage in this sort of well-poisoning tactic. Yet it's increasingly becoming a favorite trick of conservatives, as witnessed by Joel Mowbray's recent column intimating that retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni is a closet brownshirt:
Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews.
As Mowbray has it, Zinni has committed blood libel by charging that the President's foreign policy has been hijacked by administration neocons, whom Mowbray charges "everybody knows" are Jewish. Personally, I didn't know that Douglas Feith was Jewish and didn't care. Next thing you're going to tell me that Lewis "Scooter" Libby--Dick Cheney's chief of staff and a PNAC member who's usually ID'd as a leading neocon--is Jewish. Well, I don't believe it. No self-respecting Jewish man would adopt a WASPy moniker like "Scooter." He sounds like the preppy villain in a John Hughes film--you know, the kind of guy who tells Andrew McCarthy not to date Molly Ringwald because she comes from the wrong side of the tracks. Is State Department neocon John R. Bolton Jewish? Do right-wingers really expect war critics to go through the distasteful task of vetting last names like early 20th century Ivy League admissions officials before they dare to breathe the word "neocon"?
Anybody who follows politics can name a host of neocons who aren't Jewish: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Pat Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Bill Bennett. But certainly there are many prominent Jewish neoconservatives. Name me an important intellectual movement of the 20th century where that's not the case. Do Nozick, Rand and Friedman make "libertarian" a code-word for "Jew"?
In any event, to the extent there's an ethno-religious component to the current debates over foreign policy, it isn't driven by Jewish Americans, who tend to have more moderate views on preemptive war and the Middle East than the country as a whole. The more interesting story is the apocalyptic vision shared by many on the Christian Right. I liked them a lot better when all they wanted was prayer in school.
I hope that Part IIA of my discussion about Angels in America provided enough details to give a sense of what the experience of watching the film is like -- and to give an indication of the variety and complexity of themes that run through it.
Kushner's thematic material is endlessly rich and provocative. At the beginning of the second half of Angels, the Angel who has appeared to Prior Walter transmits her primary message: "Stop moving!" What she means is this: when God became displeased with His angels, He created man. But in that creation, God inadvertently permitted endless change -- progress, invention, immigation. But all of this constant change, all of this ongoing life, disrupts heaven and results in nothing but chaos and pain. Therefore, the only solution is stasis, peace, quiet, and death. Hence, all movement must stop. This is the message that the Angel wishes Prior to accept, and to act upon. And why wouldn't he? He has AIDS, he is getting sicker and sicker, and he has nothing to look forward to but endless, worsening pain. Moreover, he has been deserted by his lover, Louis.
The balance of Angels shows us how and why Prior rejects the Angel's message -- and why he chooses life. As he says several times: despite all the horrific elements of his existence at the moment, despite the pain, the loneliness, the grief, "I want more life."
Let me flesh out some of the play's themes that I indicated in the first part of this essay. I noted that one of Kushner's primary concerns is the relationship between the spiritual and the political. But more than this, Kushner is concerned about the interrelationships of the personal -- what we are in our souls, the theoretical -- what we believe, what our ideology is, and the political -- the nature of the overall system in which we live and function. Kushner dramatizes this concern through several of his characters: Louis, with his conflict between what he believes politically and his personal desertion of Prior when Prior becomes ill; Roy Cohn, with his conflict between his homosexuality and his political power, and how he must dissemble to maintain that power; and Joe, with his conflict between his homosexuality and both his conservative political views and his Mormonism.
In interviews, Kushner often talks about his view that playwrighting is "dialectical" in nature. Many people are probably quick to ascribe this view simply to Kushner's "leftism." As I discussed in my first post about Angels, Kushner is most definitely a leftist, and I probably disagree with almost all of his explicitly political beliefs. But it is a mistake to think that dialectics belongs only to the left. The greatest champion of dialectics in the name of another political theory is undoubtedly Chris Sciabarra (see, for example, this page about Total Freedom: Toward A Dialectical Libertarianism). And as Chris has shown in his work, a dialectical approach can be found in Aristotle, and in Ayn Rand. To put the matter more simply, as Chris often does, dialectics is the art of "context-keeping." This is the same issue that I discussed in my essay about "Contextual Libertarianism" -- where I emphasized, as I often do, the importance of cultural issues, and the damage that is done when cultural factors are ignored, as they often are by "atomist libertarians."
So it is not surprising that Chris should discuss a three-level model of analysis, in terms that are almost identical to the manner in which Kushner treats his material. Here is Chris describing this methodology in a major foreign policy essay:
Thus we see how, as I discussed in my post about contextual libertarianism, the approach and methodology utilized by certain leftists and libertarians are not at all dissimilar; in fact, in many ways they are almost identical.
There is yet another issue to be found here. It involves one aspect of Angels which I do not feel qualified to discuss myself. The play is rich, and dense, with religious symbolism, language and allusion. I simply do not have the knowledge to explore this subject in any meaningful way. However, I just recently found this wonderful essay about Kushner's play, and particularly about its treatment of Mormonism. The essay is by a gay Mormon, and published on the site of Affirmation, an organization for "Gay and Lesbian Mormons." In one passage, the author discusses the variety of religious symbolism in the play:
And from the same essay, here is the author on what is, in many ways, the same point about dialectics that I made above:
In this respect, perhaps the most astonishing and complex accomplishment of Angels is how Kushner dramatizes the effects of these opposed worldviews in the lives of his characters. Those characters who propound totalistic ideologies -- a belief system which demands that everything be fit into its proper place, a closed system where further thought and exploration are forbidden, and where "impermissible" thoughts or actions are condemned -- end up alone, in pain, or dead. Thus, Cohn dies in agony; and Joe and Harper are alone when the drama concludes (although there might be hope for both of them).
But the characters who appear in the final scene -- Prior, Louis, Belize and, of all people, Hannah (Joe's mother) -- are willing to explore new avenues, both in thought and action. They are willing to look at all of life, and rejoice in its complexity, infuriating complications, and, to put it simply, just how messy it can often be. But they accept it (which does not mean that they do not judge it), without demanding that every development and occurrence be forced into a preexisting ideological framework, whether or not that framework can accommodate it. They accept it, and say: More life. But the others will not or cannot do that -- and as a result, they suffer loneliness or death, and life is lost to them. The ideologies and/or politics that they champion finally destroy them.
One other aspect of Angels should be noted. As I discussed in my first post about the play, Kushner demonstrates great compassion, and even love, for all of his characters, even those (like Cohn) whose politics Kushner himself clearly despises. Thus, for example, we have the brief affair between Louis and Joe, and Louis' acknowledgment that Joe is a "decent and caring man," despite his Republicanism and Mormonism (both of which Louis hates). Joe is one of the most sympathetic characters in Angels in many ways. He is presented by Kushner himself as "decent and caring," and he struggles terribly with the conflict between his political/religious convictions and his homosexuality. But he, too, is willing to allow for change, for life to go on in unpredictable ways -- and after he leaves his wife and begins his affair with Louis, he "blossoms" and seems to be happy. At the play's conclusion, his ultimate fate is unclear, and we are not sure which path he will finally take.
But with regard to Kushner's compassion for and acceptance of life, and even of those characters whose political beliefs might be loathsome, note that Belize, who acknowledges that he hates Cohn, helps Cohn in the course of his illness. And after Cohn has died, it is Belize who makes certain that the Kaddish is recited over Cohn's body. In another remarkable scene that is part reality, part fantasy, Louis says Kaddish --with an assist from Ethel Rosenberg's ghost. The inclusion of Rosenberg in this passage is, as Louis says, "miraculous" -- although there is, of course, that special ending to the Kaddish (which I will not spoil for anyone who hasn't yet seen it). And with regard to Cohn's death, Belize talks about how hard it is to forgive, about how forgiveness wouldn't be as meaningful if it weren't so difficult, but that "maybe a queen can forgive a vanquished foe" -- and that forgiveness is perhaps where "love and justice meet."
Louis and Ethel Rosenberg saying Kaddish over Cohn's body captures one part of the division that Kushner addresses: the crucial need for a spiritual path, as well as a political and ideological one -- how all three parts of that tripartite model are needed to accept life in all its richness. Kushner also emphasizes that we must accept our bodies, and rejoice in our sexuality. As the Angel says to Hannah: "The body is the garden of the soul." And it is the Angel's demonstration to Hannah of what that means that helps Hannah to free herself from the ways in which her ideological system, her Mormonism, has strangled her soul. Thus does Kushner show us that body and soul must be united before we can fully accept what life has to offer.
There are a few additional passages from Angels that I want to mention, in large part because they show another element that I haven't mentioned sufficiently: the richness and beauty of much of its language. In one of the final scenes between Belize and Cohn, Cohn asks Belize about the afterlife. Belize describes a city like San Francisco, and offers a wealth of detail about it. Toward the end of his description, Belize says that "all the deities are Creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers." And he concludes by saying: "Race, taste, and history...finally overcome. And you ain't there." Cohn asks: "And heaven?" And Belize says: "That was heaven, Roy."
In Harper's final scene, she describes how she believes the ozone layer will be repaired (the ozone layer has been one of Harper's many obsessions): how souls arising from the dead on earth all join hands, and form atoms which plug up the holes which had been there. And she says: "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress, longing for what we've left behind...and dreaming ahead."
And in one of my favorite moments, Hannah is consoling Prior, who has been hospitalized again. Despite all their apparent differences, Hannah and Prior connect in a very meaningful way -- precisely because, whatever their explicit ideologies may be, they are alive, and they see what is before them. Prior had told Hannah a few things about the Angel that appeared to him, and he admits how frightened he is of the experience. And Hannah tells him: "An angel is a belief...with wings and arms to carry you. It's not to be afraid of. And if it can't hold you up, seek for something new."
And, believe it or not, there is still much, much more than I haven't even mentioned. But I think this gives you an idea of the richness, the complexity, the humor, the pain, the anger, the love, and the countless other elements that make up Angels in America. In Prior's insistence on "more life" -- despite his sickness, despite his pain, despite everything that the Angels believe should make him welcome death -- we witness a great testament to the healing power of our spirits, our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, all the complexities and contradictions that make us human, and to the healing power of life itself. In this sense, life is its own answer, and we need no other. As Prior says at the very end of this miraculous journey: "You are fabulous, each and every one, and I bless you. More life. The great work begins."
Against all this, we have Andrew Sullivan's entries about the play. Reviewing his archives for several weeks beginning at the end of November, we find the following items about Tony Kushner and Angels in America. There is this one:
Then there is this one:
And this one:
And this one:
And this one:
The "reader's defense" is worth reading in its entirety. I give Sullivan a few points for publishing it, and it concludes this way:
And...that's it, to date. In view of the detail I have offered about Kushner's work, I do not think it necessary to characterize Sullivan's treatment of this extraordinary achievement. However, I will note that I find it close to incomprehensible that Sullivan, a gay man, cannot even acknowledge the treatment of a character like Joe, and Kushner's searing portrayal of the terrible costs exacted by an ideology that condemns the actions of gay men, even as it continues to insist that it "loves the sinner."
But I believe that Sullivan himself -- together with innumerable other people of both Right and Left, many of whom place the demands of ideology above all else -- perfectly encapsulates the tragedy that Kushner dramatizes with a character like Roy Cohn. When ideological strictures trump everything, you finally deny yourself the complexities, the reality, and the rewards of life itself. In this sense, a sense much deeper than Sullivan's focus on an issue such as Kushner's treatment of Reagan's attitude toward gays and AIDS, Sullivan is Cohn -- and Sullivan, together with all the other conservatives which he so perfectly embodies, is indeed the "soul of modern conservatism."
So there is your choice: on one hand, you have an unbending ideology, which will force everything into its required place -- or dispense with it altogether, and ultimately destroy it. You have damnations such as "pretentious left-wing screed," "interminable," "poorly written," "holier-than-thou leftist elitism," "cheesy play" -- all offered without a shred of supporting evidence -- and you have the dismissal of a writer of extraordinary talent as a "fledgling dramatist [left] in complete darkness."
And on the other hand, you have the full embrace of life -- the embrace of our bodies, our sexuality, our religions with all their diversity, our political beliefs in all their complexity, our minds and our emotions, and all the myriad ways in which we can connect with each other, if only we will allow ourselves to do so. You have an angel that can "carry you," you have a world of continuity, of ongoing struggle and joy, where "nothing's lost forever" -- and most of all, you have more life.
Each of us, of course, is free to make his or her own choice. I've made mine. What's yours?
Cross-posted at Light of Reason First of all, let me thank David Beito for the invitation to be a guest blogger here at Liberty and Power. If you read my blog (linked at right), you already know that I spend most of my time writing about popular culture. So, for the next week, I'll probably confine my observations to that murky realm where politics and culture meet, marry and have a long and bitter divorce. Think of politics as an abusive spouse.
Fortunately, the morning news was kind to me. It seems that Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin has run afoul of Australian authorities in a very Michael Jacksonesque sort of way. The famed naturist was caught on tape feeding one of his friendly crocs with one hand and holding his infant son in the other.
After having a talk with the Irwin family, and being assured that no such antics will happen again, Queensland's department of children's services dropped the matter.
The Irwins are lucky they live in Australia and are famous. Were they nobodies in the United States, they might never have seen the tike again. My cynicism is born of experience. For the past several months, I have followed the trials of a Guatemalan immigrant who, until recently, was denied access to her infant son by the Alabama Department of Human Resources because the child had scabies, a skin condition that is hardly life threatening. David Beito’s invitation to join the Liberty and Power project Blog has offered me once again the opportunity to reflect upon these two concepts, and to clarify in my own mind the fundamental issues which face us today both as Americans and as historians.
Consider, for example, Lord Acton’s oft repeated quote, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” What is the difference between the two; power and absolute power? And how do either of those relate to the Liberty and Freedom of an individual?
The most important observation in this regard which I have heard, was made by the historian, William Appleman Williams, speaking at a Model United Nations regional meeting held at Florida Atlantic University in 1966, in some remarks which he titled, “The United Nations and the Achievement of True Sovereignty,” and from which I shall draw liberally in some of the comments which follow.
Today, we have become so immersed in the corruption of the concept of power as associated with the National State, that we have somewhat lost touch with the notion of power as related to an individual’s Freedom or Liberty.
The Nation State claims to be Sovereign as the very basis of its power, but the actions of the United States both in overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and now the attempt to rebuild that nation along “Democratic” lines, suggests that if Iraq had some sort of Sovereignty, it was limited in the face of the Power, a kind of Absolute Sovereignty, which the United States could, and did, exert against it. That in turn suggests that Liberty and Power, or Sovereignty and Absolute Sovereignty, have to be viewed along some sort of spectrum or continuum.
Historical Thinking & Continua
One of the things that stuck me as I neared retirement from the teaching of History, is the extent to which the study of History has tended to veer away from philosophical or analytical assumptions, while stressing historiography and research methods, the latter of which differ only slightly from a number of other disciplines, and hardly qualify to distinguish us as historians.
The historian who most stressed the need to think in terms of continua was Carroll Quigley, whose The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, to which this writer had the honor of suggesting a reprinting after Quigley’s death in 1977, and also to contribute a Bibliographical Note to that second edition. Quigley was one of Bill Clinton’s teachers at Georgetown University, and Clinton mentioned Quigley at the end of his speech in 1992 accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency.
I suggest that it is useful to think of Liberty as at one end of a continuum and Absolute Power at the other.
Let us ask ourselves, “what does it mean to have Liberty, or Freedom?” Williams noted that one does not really have Liberty or Freedom, what he termed “True Sovereignty,” unless you are free to act in ways that are consistent with your own ideals and beliefs, or world view (weltanschauung).
He suggested in 1966 that we, as Americans, had lost our Sovereignty as individuals (and what other kind really counts for much?), and I would maintain that this is more true than ever as we enter the year 2004. Does one need to recall for this generation that in 1966 the American government was hell bent to bestow the blessing of Liberty on the Vietnamese, as we are now determined to do the same in Iraq?
What kind of Liberty and Sovereignty do we have when Americans are increasingly too afraid to travel by airplane, because the Homeland Security Folk have proclaimed a Code Orange, or to venture abroad in the face of a growing anti-Americanism Blowback?
In my forthcoming contributions to this Blog, I intend to begin an analysis of: 1) How it came to be that we Americans have lost our True Sovereignty, or Liberty, and more importantly, 2) How can that Liberty be restored, so that we can once again live in conjunction with our own ideals, and not see them repeatedly violated by those in Political Power?
The Issue is Empire and Universal Empire
Perhaps the only saving grace of the events of the last several years is that those in pursuit of an American Empire have openly acknowledged that goal, and have proclaimed, indeed, that United States’ hegemony, including unilateralism and preemptive strikes, are rather good things as well.
This has not always been the case.
For decades many historians repeated the phrase of Samuel Flagg Bemis, that the venture into Empire boasted of by Theodore Roosevelt, the seeming favorite president of today’s politicians from Clinton to Newt Gingrich, was simply “the aberration of 1898.” Well, whether it has been one long aberration or a number of smaller ones, the Empire seems to have had a rather long life.
We used even to take pride in the notion of our anti-imperialism dating back to the American Revolution as a revolt against Empire. But in an Age of Empire, anti-imperialism is for wimps!
One of the mini-debates today, is at what point did we sort of slide into Empire? There are no shortages of dates, villains, or heroes, depending on your point of view, going back to Lincoln and perhaps earlier.
Here again, viewing the issue in terms of a continuum, is useful.
I would suggest, borrowing again somewhat from Quigley, that we think of a continuum in which a Republic is at one end, with a Universal Empire (Absolute Power) at the other, with Empire somewhere in the middle. I will attempt to keep my definitions of terms at a minimum with the suggestion that Quigley’s book would be useful for those who wish delve further in this regard.
The American Revolution
The historical “tension of development” inherent in this continuum has been a part of American history from its very beginnings. Thus, many of the Founders worried whether the Liberties associated with small republics could be sustained as the United States became centralized and more powerful in the process.
This tension was evident even before the struggle for independence. John Adams, writing in The Novanglus Letters (1775) drew a distinction between a Republic, characterized by a rule of law, and the Liberty that implied, and an Empire, a despotism, which had no such rule of law. Today, we might say, in a kind of mandarin model, that an Empire has so many laws and regulatory statutes, that the various government bureaucracies, can select at any given time which laws they wish to apply, and on what persons, selectively. Islamic appearing persons (whatever that is) seem to be in season this year for extended incarceration!
With all of the recent talk about Empire, there has not been enough discussion of what exactly is meant by that term. Let me attempt to make clear what I mean by it, and several other terms.
While one could write extensively about the phenomenon of Empire, it is perhaps impossible to improve on Oswald Spengler’s observation that it is “centralization unadulterated.” And, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, made much the same point. The growing number of interventions by the United States has served to draw attention to only one aspect of Empire, its sometime foreign policy of Imperialism, that is exerting control over and denying self-determination to, some other nation or people.
But Empire is more fundamentally a prior domestic development. That is, I cannot think of any extensive policy of Imperialism as possible before the development of massive Power, economically and militarily, within a centralized entity. Only then can one truly contemplate successfully going forth in search of “monsters to destroy!”
Which brings us finally to what Quigley and others have termed “Universal Empire,” which is obviously related to what Acton termed “Absolute Power.” What is new in the development of the American Empire is not “Empire,” or even “Imperialism,“ but the effort to move toward “Universal Empire.”
To understand that term one has to have a sense of historical analysis such as that of Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, or Quigley. For them, as more recently for Samuel P. Huntington, the fundamental unit of historical analysis is a “Civilization.” In a future piece I hope to develop the view that Toynbee, in Civilization on Trial (1947) long before, and in more subtle ways, anticipated Huntington’s 1993 notion of “a clash of civilizations. ”
In every Civilization there have been Empires within the Civilization that eventually sought Universal Empire over the whole Civilization. Most often the Universal Empire that emerged was dominated by one of those States/Empires which had been at the Periphery of the Civilization rather than at its early Core. This was true in China and in Classical Civilization where Rome became the Universal Empire.
What has characterized Western Civilization, of which the United States was on the Periphery, is that no Empire -- Spanish, French, German, Russian -- has been able to extend a Universal Empire over even the European core, let alone the Periphery, even as that Civilization invaded as many as nine (Quigley’s number) earlier Civilizations.
What is new about the American quest for a Universal Empire is that the Core and Periphery are so large, not only the Earth, but Space as well.
George Bush is not just an aspirant “town tamer,” old kind of Texas Ranger that thinks in terms of an “old” Europe, but one who thinks Inter-Galactically, of a rather large Universal Empire
What is perhaps most interesting about the emergence of the American Empire is how early its nascent leaders were willing to pursue a policy of Imperialism while Independence was still in the balance, let alone a movement toward Centralization.
Thus, in 1781, with the struggle for independence still going on in the South where General Nathaniel Greene was engaged against the British forces, General George Washington sent General LaFayette north to mount another expedition to take Canada. By this time it was apparent that the Canadians were not enamored of the notion of being part of a Protestant Confederation and that any such invasion would entail occupation and a denial of self-determination, classic aspects of Imperialism.
The reception of the militia Green Mountain Boys to General LaFayette’s proposal demonstrates another of those fault line/continua of the American Revolution, between the militia idea on one side, and the standing army view on the other, which was later reflected in the adoption of the Second Amendment. Ethan Allen and the Boys trumped the General by demanding “double pay, double rations and plunder” as the price of an assault on Canada, a sure sign they were on to the Great Game of Empire. When he replied, Washington had not authorized such terms, the Boys went back to Vermont.
Summary & Conclusion
Thus, from the stand point of the tension between Liberty and Power, the movement along the continuum from Republic to Empire, coupled with a potential policy of Imperialism, was inherent in the development of the United States from the beginning.
What is perhaps new is the attempt to move toward, what in the development of other Civilizations, has been called the phase of Universal Empire.
In this respect, the United States is truly at a cross roads, with respect to several issues. the parameters of which I hope to develop in future Blogs.
The first is the immediate threat to Liberty posed by the Power of those unilateralism and preemptive strikes which undercut the whole basis of international law and form the tactics of a Grand Strategy of Imperialism and Universal Empire.
The second is to understand how the United States has evolved into an Empire and how to reverse that process away from State Power and back toward a restoration of individual Liberty.
Finally, we have to ask, since most of us may not live long enough to see the restoration of any degree of the latter, how can one live a creative life in an Age of Empire, what this writer once termed, “Surviving in the Interstices.” The breakdown of talks over the disputed city of Kirkuk provides evidence that ethnic violence in Iraq is spreading. Most worrisome of all, the trouble is centered in the normally peaceful and stable Kurdish areas. We at Liberty and Power are delighted to welcome Professor William Marina to our ranks. Bill, who recently retired from the history department at Florida Atlantic University, and is the author of many publications including A History of Florida .
He has served on the editorial board of The Journal of Libertarian Studies and Reason Magazine . He brings to our blog a strong background in American foreign policy including extensive field research in East Asia. He has also written on the history of the anti-imperialist movement and the United States and the insurgency against U.S. occupation at the turn of the century in the Philippines.
Perhaps there is hope for the normally complaint subjects of Queen Elizabeth II after all. In response to increasingly rampant gun crime, a plurality of BBC listeners would like a new law to be introduced in parliament to allow homeowners to kill burglars :
"If listeners of the Today programme could introduce a new law to Britain, it would be one allowing them to kill an intruder in their home should the need arise.
That was the surprise - and, in the programme's own word, controversial - choice of listeners who voted for the piece of legislation they would most like to see in the statute book.
The audience for the Radio 4 programme were asked to put forward ideas that had a real chance of becoming law. Five were shortlisted and more than 26,000 took part in the final vote.
The winning idea, announced yesterday, would authorise home-owners to use any means to defend their properties from intruders. It received 37 per cent of the vote.
It narrowly beat a proposed Bill making it mandatory for individuals to offer their organs for transplant after death, unless they specifically opted out."
So reports an article today in The New York Times no less!
“The top 400 American earners in 2000 provided nearly 7 percent of all the charitable gifts reported on income tax returns for that year, well in excess of their roughly 1 percent share of overall income, according to data released yesterday by the NewTithing Group, a charity that tracks giving.
The 400 taxpayers with the highest reported incomes in 2000 made an average of $174 million and gave away, on average, $25.3 million that year. Their combined giving totaled $10.1 billion, or 6.9 percent, of the $146 billion in charitable donations that Americans deducted on their income tax returns in 2000.”
QUESTIONS FOR JOHN KERRY
MY MEETING WITH JOHN KERRY
Notoriously Unreliable
INSIDE IRAN: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION
Thursday, January 29, 2004
INTRODUCING MYSELF
FOREIGN POLICY AND THE CASH NEXUS
HEADS ROLL AT THE BBC WHILE BLAIR IS WHITEWASHED
Is it Over Already?
Big Government Conservatism: Is There Another Kind These Days?
By the way, this is the same George Will who wrote recently: “A prescription drug entitlement is not inherently unconservative, unless the welfare state itself is—and it isn't.”
New Hampshire Non Sequitur
NASA-Northwest redux
REMEMBER TUCHMAN'S WARNING: "BAD INTELLIGENCE" DIDN'T MAKE ANYONE DO ANYTHING
Kay paints a picture of Iraq falling apart from 1998 onward: Saddam Hussein was in la la land, writing bad novels even as the nation was on the eve of war. Corrupt Iraqi weapons scientists would go to Saddam with WMD schemes, get a big bankroll, then spend it on other things. Most of Iraq's WMD materials had been destroyed because Iraq believed U.N. weapons inspectors would find them and because they feared disclosures by Saddam's son-in-law following his defection in 1995.
This points to the deeper issue involved -- and it causes me to repeat again a warning sounded by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, when she discusses the constellation of mistakes and beliefs that led to the Vietnam debacle (I recently noted this passage here):
For all their truths, the Fulbright hearings were not a prelude to action in the only way that could count, a vote against appropriations, so much as an intellectual exercise in examination of American policy. The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright's preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn "not upon available facts but upon judgment," with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge "whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation."
It is simply not true that the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq was the result of "bad intelligence." In the most significant sense, that decision had nothing at all to do with the quality of the intelligence they were getting. The decision was one of policy -- a decision that depended "not upon available facts but upon judgment." As the Star-Tribune editorial points out, the Clinton administration had virtually the same intelligence -- yet came to a different conclusion altogether with regard to the proper course of action.
DEAR MS. NOONAN AND MR. GIBSON (AND ASSORTED OTHERS)
James Shapiro is author of "Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play" (Vintage, 2001). He teaches literature at Columbia University.
Mr. Shapiro begins by noting the following:
The pope's reported verdict on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" — "It is as it was" — is what admirers have been saying about every Passion play since the first one was performed in the 12th century.
I truly do realize that neither Mr. Shapiro nor I can stand any kind of comparison with the Holy Ghost, but nonetheless I think his points have some merit.
But even when edited selectively, the Gospels didn't go quite far enough in providing a relentless and incriminating story of Jewish perfidy. So 19th century directors turned to ideas offered by the likes of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), whose ecstatic visions offered damning and dramatically satisfying details nowhere mentioned in Scripture, such as the notion that the Jewish high priests passed out bribes and that the cross was built in the Temple. (Emmerich's influence on Gibson was at first acknowledged, then hastily denied.)
Whatever other differences we might have, I think you both would certainly agree that any similarities between Mr. Gibson's version of "The Passion of the Christ" and a version that was praised and applauded by Adolf Hitler might be a matter of some concern.
DUBYA'S PRO-WAR CRITICS: A HOLLOW REBELLION
Does It Ever Stop?
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
QUOTE OF THE DAY
The Bloodletting Begins
Big Government Abroad = Big Government at Home
THE HUTTON REPORT AND THE BBC
Denial, and then more denial
REACTION TO THE HUTTON REPORT
EYES WIDE SHUT
Today's Opelika-Auburn News contains a piece from the Mississippi Press of Pascagoula discussing the Jose Padilla and Guantanamo Bay cases. The piece affirms that "the right to counsel is sacred and should be granted to every American citizen," but notes that "not all the detainees are American citizens," and concludes: "In no way are they entitled -- nor should they be -- to legal representation."
This is a very different theory from that on which the United States was founded. The Founders embraced the Ciceronian and Lockean theory that the rights enshrined in the Constitution are natural rights, inherent in human nature per se, and so are universally applicable to all human beings; they are not the products of parochial legislation or the privilege of a select few.
In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote:
Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. ... His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. ... Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual.
Alexander Hamilton, in The Farmer Refuted (a debate with authoritarian conservative Samuel Seabury), likewise wrote:
The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. [Emphasis mine -- RTL] You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty, is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society. ...
(Yes, Hamilton had his libertarian side!)
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Two centuries later, Americans now apparently believe that those liberties they still enjoy are a special gift they have been granted by a generous government. Those liberties are now seen as a privilege of birth, not a right of all humanity; hence they may be denied to those outside the charmed circle of U.S. citizenship.
Thomas Jefferson had harsh words for this style of thinking. In the last letter he ever wrote, Jefferson observed:
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
Too many eyes are closed again these days. Magnesium, anybody?
THE HUTTON REPORT
BETTY ANN ONG AND THE 9/11 COMMISSION
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
ON SHARPTON, SILVER SCREENS, AND SILBER
IF YOU REELECT BUSH, YOU DESERVE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU GET
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot, obtained a visa to come to the United States just weeks before the attacks despite being under a federal terrorism indictment, a report by the federal commission investigating the attacks revealed Monday.
And here is a Washington Post story, about the broader failures with regard to the Iraq war:
Your liberal wimps and weenies have been whining for months that the Bush administration was so busy scaring the country into war with Iraq that it failed to plan for what to do after the war. That's baloney, veteran journalist James Fallows writes in a detailed 17-page Atlantic Monthly article titled "Blind Into Baghdad."
The article lists several notable examples of this failure of leadership, including this:
Prewar reports by the Future of Iraq project, by the Army War College and by the Center for Strategic and International Studies all warned against disbanding the Iraqi army, which could, the War College predicted, "lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society."
And some of those men might have killed the now-dead American servicemen whose letters home are included at the end of the story.
SIX MORE SOLDIERS, WHERE IS THE CONCERN?
ON THE NANNY STATE AND BEATING PRESIDENTIAL DEAD HORSES
Nanny State Update
fascists nannies have decided to circumvent the D.C. City Council and go right to the voters, apparently feeling they have a better chance of squelching personal freedom through direct democracy than through legislation considered by elected representatives.
Monday, January 26, 2004
ZERO GRAVITY
THE RELATIVE SUPERIORITY OF U.S. UNIVERSITIES
NEW ARTICLE BY BOB HIGGS
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION ARE OVERATED AS A THREAT TO AMERICA
DIRTY HARRY IS A LIBERTARIAN
SULLIVAN DOESN'T GET IT. BUSH IS CONSISTENT
Sunday, January 25, 2004
OBITUARIES
AL FRANKEN: TOO OLD TO CARE
MARK SHIELDS
Funny. I Don't Feel Insulted.
Sometimes It Really Is All About Oil
"Cheney said oil and gas companies must explore where the reserves are, and that means doing business in countries that may have policies that the U.S. does not like." Cheney said, "The long-term horizon of the oil industry is at odds with the short term nature of politics."
That of course was before 9/11. But you have to wonder why Cheney -- who oversaw the creation of the subsidiary still doing business with Iran -- continues to allow that subsidiary to operate.
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Saturday, January 24, 2004
BE SILENT -- AND OBEY
David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programme was hidden in Syria.
And just why should we believe Mr. Kay, who has been wrong about everything of importance thus far?
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O-KAY, O-KAY
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them."
O-KAY, O-KAY
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them."
O-KAY, O-KAY
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them."
Friday, January 23, 2004
THE DEATH OF A GANGBANGER = THE DEATH OF A U.S SOLDIER?
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Hello Again
NIXON IS TO CAMBODIA AS BUSH IS TO...
Nonfiction Titans
MOBILE REGISTER DEPLORES CAMPUS CENSORSHIP IN ALABAMA
DEAN'S "BARBARIC YAWP"
IDEOLOGY AND MYTH IN AMERICAN POLITICS
CONSERVATIVES CHALLENGE DUBYA'S SPENDING SPREE
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
AN ARGUMENT FOR DENNIS KUCINICH
Moon/Mars
KUDOS FOR ALABAMA FREE SPEECH HELP
IOWA CAUCUS
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
AMERICA'S BLOODIEST RACE WAR?
LIKE A LASER BEAM. OR SOMETHING.
PAUL O'NEILL'S BOOK OF REVELATIONS
MY VERY FIRST BLOG
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA CENSORSHIP: MOBILE REGISTER ARTICLE
POLITICAL MUSINGS
Monday, January 19, 2004
CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY
If you're a service provider, sometimes you compete with your customers for your own services. The customer is always right -- because the party to whose wishes you ultimately decide to cater, the party you treat as being "right," is thereby your customer.
ARE STUDENTS CUSTOMERS?
The best relationship between educators and families is via partnership.
And this is not at all the same kind of thing that's involved when a family goes to a restaurant or a grocery store to buy food, or a department store to buy clothing. Although I may return to the business if I'm pleased with the food or clothing, there is no need for ongoing conversation between the businessperson and me.
That's simply wrong. Prices are communication of relative scarcity; excess or unplanned inventory accumulation is a communication of mistaken conceptions about demand. Mass customization, increasing in the world today, requires more ways to cheaply transmit information about what is possible and what is desirable. What ways are there for professors and students, teachers and parents, to communicate these?The phrase, "the customer is always right" is another problem when applied to education. Some businesses say that when the customer is dissatisfied with a purchase, the item can be returned for cash or credit.
But with all due respect, families, parents, grandparents or whoever is caring for the youngster are not always right. None of us — educators, family members, whoever — is always right.
No, but that's true in any business. Should the customer who buys "the wrong computer" or the "wrong shoes" be prevented from it? To some extent, yes. Software firms bundle their products with features and not allow complete picking-and-choosing between them. Why? Because they may have better information about the functionality of the programs. They may not want to sell you the product the way you want. That's fine -- and if you don't want the product the way they make it, you shop somewhere else. But why should consumer sovereignty not be the basis of the contract between parent and teacher? Overall, the situation is more complex than simply proclaiming, "The customer is always right."
Consumer sovereignty doesn't mean that. It means "the customer has the right to be wrong, and accept the consequences thereby." When someone with governmental power (read: coercion) says "I know better; trust me," the first reaction is skepticism. And rightly so.
U..S. POSTAL SERVICE HONORS A STALINIST
Sunday, January 18, 2004
TODAY BAGHDAD, TOMORROW BARSOOM?
On January 10th, the London Telegraph, in a story titled "George W. Bush boldly goes to Mars," hailed Bush’s plans for a manned Mars mission as an expression of "mankind's loftiest ambitions."
Now I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone. I long to see Mars and other planets visited, colonised, even terraformed. I've watched the progress of the latest Mars rover with fascination. Indeed, the need to renounce NASA was probably the biggest hurdle for me in becoming a libertarian originally. But I cannot endorse a space exploration program led by an institution both inept and criminal, and funded by extortion.
The Telegraph lectures us: "To begin such an endeavour at a time when the US government is already running a large budget deficit is, in its way, heroic. ... It would be nice if those who habitually dismiss the President as selfish and insular would for once acknowledge his largesse."
The terms "heroic" and "largesse" would apply if Bush were putting up his own money. When instead he proposes to fleece the taxpayers -- taxpayers already cringing in the shadow of Bush’s looming deficits, which dwarf his laughable "tax cuts" -- the appellations seem grossly misplaced.
A nonviolent approach to space exploration is perfectly possible: get the State off the economy's back, thereby freeing up the resources and efficiency of the market sector to fund a cheaper and less militarised private space program. (See the marvelous satire How the West Wasn't Won.) But this would be disaster for the bureaucratic/corporate plutocracy that plans to milk the U.S. taxpayers for billions of dollars.
The Telegraph acknowledges that in "strictly practical terms,"
Bush's Mars project makes "little sense," but gushes: "Americans, thank Heaven, do not always think in strictly practical terms." The Mars mission, we're told, will "ennoble every member of the human race."
The original meaning of the word "ennoble" is "confer an unearned income on special interests by government fiat at the expense of exploited serfs." Someone's going to get ennobled, alright.
REASONS TO LIKE HOWARD DEAN
Saturday, January 17, 2004
In Defense of the Caucus!
RON PAUL IS SAFE IN 2004
Friday, January 16, 2004
SHARI'A LAW ADOPTED FOR WOMEN IN IRAQ
"Embedded"
BIN LADEN OR HUSSEIN
One Term President
FELONIOUS MONK
There's been some discussion recently on L&P (see here, here, and here) as to whether ex-felons should have their Second and Fifteenth Amendment rights restored. Let me add a couple of points in favour of this.
a) The most fundamental justification of the right to bear arms is self-defense. To the extent that the right to vote can be justified, it is likewise primarily on self-defense grounds. To say that ex-felons should be denied these rights is to say that they should be forever denied the right of self-defense. Anyone who cannot be trusted with that right cannot be allowed safely on the streets in any case. If someone can't be trusted with a gun or a ballot, how can they be trusted with knives, baseball bats, chainsaws, or any of the other tools to which they will have access once they get out of prison? (Indeed, as I've argued elsewhere, the right to vote should be extended to currently incarcerated prisoners as well, to "prevent ... those in power from automatically disenfranchising their opponents simply by incarcerating them." For obvious reasons this doesn’t apply to the right to bear arms, however.)
b) In the particular case of the Second Amendment, there is no effective way of enforcing a ban on gun ownership by ex-felons without interfering with the rights of non-felons. How, for example, would one prevent an ex-felon from obtaining a gun except by requiring every gun owner to be licensed, registered, etc.? Such prior restraint is incompatible with both natural justice and the Constitution.
The conduct of ex-felons can be specially regulated in a society that is itself generally regulated, but not in a free society, for in a free society there is no effective way to police their conduct or enforce the required restrictions. Anyone who is not a candidate for exile or perpetual imprisonment must be granted full liberty of action.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
DIDN'T DO A GOOD JOB WITH THIS ONE.
By far the funniest of these was a young lady from our state, who described herself as a college student and a Republican who wants socialism and doesn't think Bush can deliver it. Medved, obviously amused, asked her what she meant by socialism, and she replied that she wants to go to college for free and thinks everyone else should be able to go without paying tuition, too. Now, obviously this young woman has not yet been schooled in the art of demanding socialism by proclaiming it as a selfless and noble system under which every person is given equal distribution of resources, and so on; she took the breathtaking and refreshingly honest course of telling us it would benefit her directly.
Medved then asked if she thought a janitor working two jobs to put his own kids through a technical school should be forced to pay for her college education. She said, "Oh, I'm not asking him to pay for it, the government should pay for it." When asked where she thought the government got the money, if not from taxpayers, she said, "Well, it just should be free."
Walloworld thinks this is endemic in our culture.I think this young lady's comments reflect a worldview that eschews personal responsibility, seeks to avoid discomfort, and essentially wants the proverbial "free lunch." It is reflected in the current debate over digital piracy of music and movies: I routinely hear file swappers suggest that what they're doing isn't a problem because it's just a few songs, or the music industry charges to much for CDs, or the like. Basically, that it should just be free.
It's not quite that bad. Most students think, when their classes are closed because they are full, that it's because the faculty member doesn't want to teach more students, so they come and whine. We don't have that problem, because we schedule our classes to be the size of our rooms. Rather than say we don't want to grade more exams, we say the room has no more chairs. (We didn't plan it that way, but years of budget cuts have led us to have classes that fill our rooms to capacity.) You often get in reply a blinking stare. "Can I sit on the floor?" No, miss, the fire marshall has unkind things to say when we do this. Eventually they understand and leave. But it takes a cluebat that large to get the concept of scarcity through.
SPACECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT
HUSSEIN, BIN LADEN, AND GRAMSCI
Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle American troops, according to a document found with the former Iraqi leader when he was captured ... The document appears to be a directive, written after he lost power, from Mr. Hussein to leaders of the Iraqi resistance, counseling caution against getting too close to Islamic jihadists and other foreign Arabs coming into occupied Iraq, according to American officials. It provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Mr. Hussein's government and terrorists from Al Qaeda. C.I.A. interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Mr. Hussein. Officials said Mr. Hussein apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the Baathists, who were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he wanted his supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jihadists ...
BERNSTEIN, LIBERTY OF CONTRACT, AND CIVIL RIGHTS
UNDERSTANDING "HOW GOVERNMENT WORKS"
A Republican senator delivered a blistering attack yesterday against Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards, describing North Carolina’s junior senator as an “empty suit” who lacks understanding of how government works.
I assume this is the same Rick Santorum who said the following:
[I]f the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold - Griswold was the contraceptive case - and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you - this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. ...
Well, that's certainly one "understanding" of "how government works" -- a theocratic one in Santorum's case, as I discussed here.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
RE: BARBARIANS AND WIMPS
What About O'Neill's Performance
GREAT CARTOON FROM MY HOMETOWN PAPER
We're the Government. We're Here to Help!
"We know this is a sensitive area," Dr. Horn said. "We don't want to come in with a heavy hand. All services will be voluntary. We want to help couples, especially low-income couples, manage conflict in healthy ways. We know how to teach problem-solving, negotiation and listening skills. This initiative will not force anyone to get or stay married. The last thing we'd want is to increase the rate of domestic violence against women."
Barbarians and Wimps
NOT CHEMICAL WEAPONS AFTER ALL
HEMINGWAY ON WAR AND INFLATION
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
In broad daylight on Sept. 11, 2003, somebody deposited what could have been a "dirty bomb" at the Washington Monument. U.S. Park Police never noticed.
Good to see such wonderful government efficiency and thoroughness in action.
ARMY WAR COLLEGE CRITICIZES "UNNECESSARY" IRAQ WAR
Monday, January 12, 2004
Introduction & Provocation
A BUSH-GERMANY COMPARISON WORTH NOTING
[Jeffrey Record's] essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
Echoing a number of the themes that I discussed in this essay (and especially in the final part), Record says:
The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil.
I've only skimmed the report so far, but here are a few excerpts that caught my attention (the complete report is here, in a PDF file). Record discusses the conceptual problems with regard to manner in which the Bush administration has framed the global war on terrorism:
Unfortunately, stapling together rogue states and terrorist organizations with different agendas and threat levels to the United States as an undifferentiated threat obscures critical differences among rogues states, among terrorist organizations, and between rogue states and terrorist groups. One is reminded of the postulation of an international Communist monolith in the 1950s which blinded American policymakers to the influence and uniqueness of local circumstances and to key national, historical, and cultural differences and antagonisms within the "Bloc." Communism was held to be a centrally directed international conspiracy; a Communist anywhere was a Communist everywhere, and all posed an equal threat to America’s security. A result of this inability to discriminate was disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam against an enemy perceived to be little more than an extension of Kremlin designs in Southeast Asia and thus by definition completely lacking an historically comprehensible political agenda of its own.
A bit later, Record notes:
Dr. Condoleezza Rice got it right in 2000: "[T]he first line of defense [in dealing with rogue states] should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
The Post sums up the report's theme in this way: "Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew." And this problem is the direct result of the administration's failure to identify the differing natures and levels of threat represented by our various enemies and potential enemies -- and the Bush administration's oversimplification of these complexities leads to the comparison between our current strategy and the profound errors committed by Germany in the last century, not once but twice:
Insistence on moral clarity once again trumps strategic discrimination. Even if all terrorism is evil, most terrorist organizations do not threaten the United States. Many pursue local agendas that have little or no bearing on U.S. interests. Should the United States, in addition to fi ghting al-Qaeda, gratuitously pick fights with the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A. [Fatherland and Liberty]), the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Sendero Luminoso, Hamas, and Hizbollah? Do we want to provoke national- and regional-level terrorist organizations that have stayed out of America’s way into targeting the U.S. interests and even the American homeland?
I look forward to reading the entire report when I have time, and I think you might find it of great interest as well.
HORWITZ's BLOG MENTIONED AT NATIONAL REVIEW'S THE CORNER
THE UNTHREATENING STORM
RUSH LIMBAUGH, FOOTBALL, AND JAIL TIME
POSTREL ON HAYEK AND HAYEK & GAY MARRIAGE
TAKING ANOTHER LOOK AT POLLACK
What's more, we should not forget that containment was failing. The shameful performance of the United Nations Security Council members (particularly France and Germany) in 2002-2003 was final proof that containment would not have lasted much longer; Saddam would eventually have reconstituted his WMD programs, although further in the future than we had thought. (emphasis added)
Sunday, January 11, 2004
MUSICAL MADNESS
[The problem] has bubbled to the surface recently with press accounts of a new regulation imposed by the European Union that reduces the allowable sound exposure in the European orchestral workplace from the present 90 decibels to 85. The problem is, a symphony orchestra playing full-out can easily reach 96 to 98 decibels, and certain brass and percussion instruments have registered 130 to 140 at close range.
As you might imagine, determining "what effect" this "directive" might have is not all that simple. Contrasting the EU's regulation with what OSHA does in the United States (which is mercifully much, much less in this area, at least for the moment), the story tells us:
Though more stringent in its guidelines, the European Union has been less than clear about how to implement them. Is an orchestra to play more quietly even as Wagner or Mahler urges it toward a cataclysmic fortissimo? Is it to avoid the offending works altogether, thus dispensing with most of the symphonic literature of the 20th century? Are composers of the 21st century to scale back their dynamic demands, in the process putting any number of brass players and percussionists out of work? And how is it all to be monitored and enforced?
Ah, me. What can one say? Whatever would we do without the government to look after us all, in every facet of our lives?
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP AND COUNTERFEITING
RESPONSE TO HORWITZ AND DRUM ON EX-FELON RIGHTS
KENNETH POLLACK TAKES ANOTHER LOOK
The one action for which I cannot hold Administration officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for going to war.
The conclusion of Pollack's article is as follows:
Finally, the U.S. government must admit to the world that it was wrong about Iraq's WMD and show that it is taking far-reaching action to correct the problems that led to this error. Iraq is not going to be the last foreign-policy challenge in which we must make choices based on ambiguous evidence. When the United States confronts future challenges, the exaggerated estimates of Iraq's WMD will loom like an ugly shadow over the diplomatic discussions. Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth. The only way that we can regain the world's trust is to demonstrate that we understand our mistakes and have changed our ways.
And I think it should be noted for the record that Pollack now says the following about his overall view of the Iraq war:
My reluctant conviction that war was our only option (although not at the time or in the manner in which the Bush Administration pursued it) was not entirely based on the nuclear threat, but that threat was the most important factor in it.
I think it is safe to say that this is not precisely a ringing and impassioned endorsement of this venture.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
YOU DON'T SAY
THE REVOLVING DOOR -- CHAPTER 13,468,439
One of President Bush's advisers is leaving to become Ford Motor Co.'s chief lobbyist in Washington, the auto company said Friday.
Or as Ayn Rand has some of her characters (usually the villains) remark in Atlas Shrugged, it's important to have a "friend in Washington," given the nature of our mixed economy. (I have discussed various aspects of this corporate statism at length, with regard to both its domestic component and its foreign policy implications.)
Rearden disliked the subject. He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary. An inexplicable kind of distaste, part fastidiousness, part boredom, stopped him whenever he tried to consider it.
But if you're going to have such a man, who could be better than someone who had been "a principal deputy [for the White House] for legislative affairs"? Who better, indeed.
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART IV: SKEPTICISM ABOUT POWER
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART III: THE NONAGRESSION AXIOM
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART II: THE LOCKEAN BARGAIN
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM: WILL IT LIBERATE?
BARBARA TUCHMAN TOLD YOU SO, AND IN GREAT DETAIL
The assessment given in the Pollack article appears to be so reasonable that I believe it will probably serve as a platform for any further discussion of the issue. I find that I come away from the article only MORE persuaded of conclusions I had already reached-- and I am sure that others, with different conclusions, will have exactly the same response...AND THEY WILL BE RIGHT.
I completely agree with Jim's positive assessment of this.
For all their truths, the Fulbright hearings were not a prelude to action in the only way that could count, a vote against appropriations, so much as an intellectual exercise in examination of American policy. The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright's preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn "not upon available facts but upon judgment," with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge "whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation."
It's a terrible tragedy that we need to learn the same lessons over and over and over again, and incur awful costs of all kinds while doing so. And there are still more lessons from Vietnam that we have to absorb -- and I suspect it will be a rather painful process.
IMAGINE IT, MR. O'NEILL
"I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
I find it hard to believe that a grown man -- and especially one who has spent as much time in politics as O'Neill has -- could actually believe this. I suspect he doesn't, in fact -- and that he only hopes he won't "be attacked for telling the truth."
The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq including the use of American troops within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001, not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported. That is what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
In a similar vein, I cannot believe that any of this comes as news to anyone who has followed events at all for the last year and done even 15 minutes of research. For heaven's sake, the friendly little gang of neocons - oh, dear, excuse me; did I use a bad word? -- wrote this in a letter to President Clinton in January 1998:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
Paul Wolfowitz was one of those who signed the letter.
We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. ...
In fact, these particular proponents of this "muscular," aggressive, interventionist foreign policy have been touting these ideas for over a decade.
CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
Welcome back to the real world, Mr. O'Neill.
WILLIAMS HAS MORE EXPLAINING TO DO
RIGHTS OF EX-FELONS
RESTORING THE SECOND AND FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS OF EX-FELONS
GAYS, LESBIANS, AND LIBERTARIANISM
I AM IN GOOD COMPANY
Friday, January 9, 2004
BREEDING A CULTURE OF FEAR AND DEPENDENCE
VERMONT TOWN CONSIDERING SECESSION
NIGHTMARE IN MONTGOMERY
DICTATRESS OF THE WORLD
... I think the American military should be used to depose tyrants and promote constitutional democracy. There's obviously got to be a priority structure, since we don't have the means or the manpower to fight the entire Axis of Evil plus the AoE Junior Auxilliary simultaneously, but generally speaking Gulf War II was in line with a foreign policy I was advocating during my wildest and wooliest collegiate Bush-hating days: Stop paying the bastards, and start ousting them. ... How leaving well enough alone in countries ruled by mass-murdering dictators is libertarian is something that continues to escape me ....
While this is a conundrum for Sean, it was not one for the proto-libertarians who founded the United States, who, as I'm sure Sean recalls, continually warned of "entangling alliances" and said that America should be a beacon of liberty to the world but the guarantor only of her own. By focusing only on the supposed good the U.S. can do abroad by overthrowing dictators left and right, I'm afraid Sean takes his eye off the ball. Even assuming the U.S. government is somehow better at installing democracies elsewhere than it is running its own, what happens on the home front while all of this nation building is going on? Well, we have a pretty good example right now: Americans get socked with the costs. That means either higher taxes or massive debts (i.e., future taxes). That means the human costs, the soldiers who die or are maimed and the families left behind or forced to care for disabled loved ones. That means increased "security" measures at home, providing very little security while eroding Constitutional rights.
Thursday, January 8, 2004
NO SMOKING GUN
With Friends Like These, U.S. Enemies Don't Seem as Bad
THIS IS DISGUSTING
Protecting the Administrative Rear-End
SCHUMPETER'S VIEWS ON WORLD WAR II
CLARK, JUDGES, AND PRECEDENT
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
SCALIA ON DRUG TESTING AND THE DANGERS OF "SYMBOLIC" ACTS
Today's decision would be wrong, but at least of more limited effect, if its approval of drug testing were confined to that category of employees assigned specifically to drug interdiction duties. Relatively few public employees fit that description. But in extending approval of drug testing to that category consisting of employees who carry firearms, the Court exposes vast numbers of public employees to this needless indignity. Logically, of course, if those who carry guns can be treated in this fashion, so can all others whose work, if performed under the influence of drugs, may endanger others - automobile drivers, operators of other potentially dangerous equipment, construction workers, school crossing guards. A similarly broad scope attaches to the Court's approval of drug testing for those with access to "sensitive information." 1 Since this category is not limited to Service employees with drug interdiction duties, nor to "sensitive information" specifically relating to drug traffic, today's holding apparently approves drug testing for all federal employees with security clearances - or, indeed, for all federal employees with valuable confidential information to impart. Since drug use is not a particular problem in the Customs Service, employees throughout the Government are no less likely to violate the public trust by taking bribes to feed their drug habit, or by yielding to blackmail. Moreover, there is no reason why this super-protection against harms arising from drug use must be limited to public employees; a law requiring similar testing of private citizens who use dangerous instruments such as guns or cars, or who have access to classified information, would also be constitutional.
Skipping ahead a couple centuries...
"Today, we do from about Reconstruction to as close as we can get to present day. I'm going to tell you that's a hustle."
That's 130 years. And why start at Reconstruction? Well, it's because it's not important to know Appomattox, Grant and Lee."If all kids are asked to do is to memorize facts, not many of us are good at that. They say, 'I don't memorize well,' and I say, 'You shouldn't have to. You should understand it.'
Her department head concurs:"What's the point in memorizing it if you don't understand it? Yes, the facts are important, but you have to be able to apply those facts with meaning, knowledge and understanding."
What is their of understanding, though, when they know no facts? Is it fear of a standardized exam that troubles these teachers? Critical thinking is not a substitute for core knowledge -- it needs knowledge as a building block. The popular educratic idea that there is such a thing as "thinking ability" totally divorced from any referrants is misleading at best.
SKETCHES OF MASS DESTRUCTION
U.S. SUPPORTS STATE-OWNED OIL INDUSTRY FOR IRAQ
GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND IRAQI QUAGMIRES
THE RICH AND CHARITY: QUESTION OF CLARIFICATION
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
THE PRODUCT OF MAN'S MIND
ARTISTS AND ECONOMICS
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
Monday, January 5, 2004
Hello all!
WELCOME TO STEVE HORWITZ
NICKY ARNSTEIN, NICKY ARNSTEIN...
CONSERVATISM DRIFTS TO THE LEFT: CONRAD BLACK AND FDR
WAS ADAM SMITH TOO OPTIMISTIC?
Robert Theron Brockman II thinks the passage I quoted from Adam Smith earlier this week (see here and here) is "overly optimistic." Pointing to Smith’s line "All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished," Brockman writes:
This is demonstrably untrue. If said fraud, perfidy, or injustice is
perpetrated by themselves, their clan, their tribe, their race, or their
nation, men’s tolerance (and often enthusiasm) for such things is
greatly increased. This is most easily observed at the national level.
Most people (including and especially Americans) consider the people of
other nations largely expendable, and are willing to justify exceptional
amounts of betrayal and "collateral damage" to the extent it furthers
"national greatness." Any loss of life on one's "own soil" (hundreds of
miles away owned by strangers), justifies massive (poorly targeted)
retaliation and collective punishment.
I agree with everything that Brockman says here (see, e.g., my article Thinking Our Anger) – except his evaluation of Smith.
The values of Secular Humanism (or even Christianity) are very, very
rare. Most of the planet operates under either tribalism or that
scaled-up form of tribalism we call nationalism. I think it's
despicable but there you are.
Smith was by no means unaware of the fact that when "said fraud, perfidy, or injustice is
perpetrated by themselves, their clan, their tribe, their race, or their
nation, men's tolerance (and often enthusiasm) for such things is
greatly increased." On the contrary, this is one of the central themes of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. As Smith writes at III. i. 4. 91-93:
It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable. He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. ... So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any indifferent spectator would consider it. ... This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.
Smith – along with his contemporary David Hume – consciously modeled his account of moral and aesthetic properties on the dispositionalist account of colour that had been popularised by John Locke and others. According to colour-dispositionalism, to say that a fire engine is red is to say that it has a tendency to look red to – i.e., to cause sensations of redness in – physiologically normal humans in standard lighting conditions. The fact that the fire engine doesn’t look red under weird lighting conditions, or in the dark, or to a person who is colour-blind or just plain blind, is thus no objection to calling it red. Analogously, according to Smith and Hume, to call an action or character trait morally good is to say that it has a tendency to cause a feeling of moral approval in psychologically normal humans under conditions of impartiality (i.e., when they are evaluating conduct with which they have no personal connection). Bias is thus seen as a factor that distorts moral perception in the same way that nonstandard lighting distorts colour perception. (There are various differences between Smith's and Hume's accounts but they need not concern us here.)
So when Smith says that all human beings "abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished," he means this in the same sense as the claim that all human beings perceive fire engines as red. All human beings do perceive fire engines as red – when they are able to get a proper look at them. Whenever a red object fails to look red, it is because some obstacle – either constitutional (e.g., visual impairment) or circumstantial (e.g., nonstandard lighting) – interferes with the perceiver's getting a proper look. Likewise, all human beings perceive "fraud, perfidy, and injustice" as abhorrent when they are able to get a proper look at them. Whenever these fail to appear abhorrent, there is either a constitutional obstacle (e.g., psychopathy) to proper perception or a circumstantial one (e.g., bias). (Moral vice, to which there is no precise analogue in the colour case, stands somewhere between these alternatives; it is like a habit of refusing to look at fire engines except in bad lighting.)
There are difficulties, to be sure, with Smith’s theory – particularly as regards Smith's vacillation as to whether our emotional dispositions make things moral or are responses to independent moral facts. (Hume certainly leans toward the former, more subjectivist reading, but Smith is less resolute on that point.) But I don't think he’s guilty of a misreading of human nature.
WHY IS LIBYA DIFFERENT FROM IRAQ?
Sunday, January 4, 2004
ADAM SMITH AGAINST UTILITARIANISM
Sometimes too we have occasion to defend the propriety of observing the general rules of justice by the consideration of their necessity to the support of society. We frequently hear the young and the licentious ridiculing the most sacred rules of morality, and professing, sometimes from the corruption, but more frequently from the vanity of their hearts, the most abominable maxims of conduct. Our indignation rouses, and we are eager to refute and expose such detestable principles. But though it is their intrinsic hatefulness and detestableness, which originally inflames us against them, we are unwilling to assign this as the sole reason why we condemn them, or to pretend that it is merely because we ourselves hate and detest them. The reason, we think, would not appear to be conclusive. Yet why should it not; if we hate and detest them because they are the natural and proper objects of hatred and detestation? But when we are asked why we should not act in such or such a manner, the very question seems to suppose that, to those who ask it, this manner of acting does not appear to be for its own sake the natural and proper object of those sentiments. We must show them, therefore, that it ought to be so for the sake of something else. Upon this account we generally cast about for other arguments, and the consideration which first occurs to us, is the disorder and confusion of society which would result from the universal prevalence of such practices. We seldom fail, therefore, to insist upon this topic.
But though it commonly requires no great discernment to see the destructive tendency of all licentious practices to the welfare of society, it is seldom this consideration which first animates us against them. All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.
ANARCHY IS ORDER
Bidinotto's original article: The Contradiction in Anarchism
I'll post a link to my counter-counter-counter-reply as soon as I've written it!
My critique of Bidinotto's article: Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Bidinotto's reply: Contra Anarchism
My counter-reply: Anarchism as Constitutionalism, Part 2
Bidinotto's counter-counter-reply: Contra Anarchism, Part II
Saturday, January 3, 2004
THE LORD OF THE CA-CHINGS
NEOCONSPIRACY THEORY
ANGELS IN AMERICA: A HYMN TO LIFE
In Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, I explored Rand's mode for analyzing every social problem on three distinct levels: (1) The Personal, in which she focused on the psycho-epistemological and ethical dimensions; (2) The Cultural, in which she focused on the linguistic, pedagogical, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions; and (3) The Structural, in which she focused on the political and economic dimensions. Every social problem-and solution-entailed mutually reinforcing personal, cultural, and structural factors. This is why Rand maintained: "Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries" ("For the New Intellectual"). It is also why she criticized Libertarians: for seeking political and economic change without the requisite personal and cultural foundations. But it is just as faulty to focus on ethics or culture to the exclusion of structural realities. By disconnecting any level from the others, we drain the radical life-blood out of Objectivism and ossify Rand's system into a form of conservatism. The active embrace of one-dimensional thinking by some Objectivists undermines fundamentally Rand's contextual, dialectical way of looking at the world. It is a perverse kind of "vulgar" one-sidedness that has led "far too many Objectivists [to] act as if they are conservatives who simply don't go to church," as economist Larry Sechrest suggests (OWL list, 29 January 2003).
The cosmos in which this play is set is a hodge-podge of elements drawn from a variety of religious and quasi-religious sources. The wrestling-the-angel motif, the flaming Alephs, the ladder on which Prior ascends into Heaven, and the Kaddish for Roy Cohn are drawn from Judaism. The angelic-visitation motif, the peepstones, and the Restoration rhetoric ("A marvelous work and a wonder we undertake. . . . The Great Work begins" [Millennium 62, 119]) are drawn from Mormonism. The prominent role of sex in the workings of the cosmos, the hermaphroditic Angel, and the Angel's multiple Emanations--Fluor, Phosphor, Lumen, Candle--are elements of Gnosticism (which Kushner may have encountered through the writings of Harold Bloom, who calls himself a Jewish Gnostic). The Charlton Heston Moses drag is drawn, obviously, from The Ten Commandments; since, as I have already shown, Kushner insists that the drag is not a lapse into an elbow-in-the-ribs playing style, I presume that the drag is employed as an widely-recognized symbol of the prophetic vocation. (Personally, I think it's pathetic that Americans' concept of the prophetic vocation has been determined by Hollywood, but c'est la vie.) The play even incorporates several allusions to the film The Wizard of Oz, which, as a ubiquitous and at least vestigially archetypal story of the fantastic, is the closest thing to a mythic community text to be found within gay culture. Allusions to the film include the lines, "People come and go so quickly here" (Millennium 34), "If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with" (Perestroika 53), and several lines following Prior's return from Heaven (". . . but all the same I kept saying I want to go home. And they sent me home" [Perestroika 140]).
Which brings me to the concept of "casserole myth." Having rejected codified, totalizing theories or belief systems, Kushner turns instead to an organic, open-ended worldview. He describes the process by which this worldview comes into being in the afterword to Perestroika: "I have been blessed with remarkable friends, colleagues, comrades, collaborators: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery; and we help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace, and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected. (158)"
It is this process of organizing for themselves their understanding of the world in which we see Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah engaged in the play's closing scene. Drawing from Jewish, Christian, and Mormon sacred stories, they create together a new Story, a new myth, the myth of their future cleansing and Prior's healing in the restored fountain of Bethesda.5 Note that this Story is not a theory; it is not codified, nor does it attempt to totalize human experience. Louis hastens to assure the audience that he and the other characters regard the myth as a metaphor, not a literal prophecy ("Not literally in Jerusalem, I mean we don't want this to have sort of Zionist implications" [148]). But its metaphorical nature does not lessen the myth's importance as a space in which a variety of belief systems come together in a mutual expression of hope for the future.
It is this space which I call a casserole myth. I borrow the term "casserole" from my Latin American studies: unlike North Americans, who have traditionally regarded their culture as a melting pot, Latin Americans describe their culture as a casserole (cazuela), i.e., as a combination of elements from a variety of cultures--Native American, Spanish, African, etc.--each of which has retained its identity rather than being assimilated into a mainstream culture. To borrow a phrase from Angels in America, Latin Americans regard their culture as a "melting pot where nothing melted" (Millennium 10). Similarly, what I term a casserole myth is a combination of beliefs, these beliefs not being assimilated or reconciled into some new totalizing religious system, but rather retaining their own identity in what becomes a non-codified, non-totalizing understanding of the world which expresses itself through a diversity of religious motifs and symbols.
POSEUR ALERT II: "His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential — it comes in complete paragraphs, which themselves come complete with footnotes, jokes and marginalia. The word "dialectic" puts in frequent appearances, and questions about God are liable to be answered with references to 18th-century astronomers." - from the latest New York Times puff-piece on Tony Kushner. There's also a lovely Freudian slip in the text, as a friend pointed out to me in an email: "The writer quotes Kushner: 'Brecht was like a light bulb going off.' Leaving the fledgling dramatist in complete darkness, it seems."
'ANGELS' FLOPS: You know that the emperor is sparsely clad when even some of the contributors to the New York Times forums concede they fell asleep in the middle of "Angels in America." The NYT has devoted week after week and page after page to the most glowing hype about this production I can remember. So did almost every other major outlet. I read nothing but raves. (No, I haven't watched it yet. I just got cable two days ago. But I will try and slog through it this Sunday, as I did with the original, interminable stage production.) But the ratings were execrable, despite the massive hype. Hmmm. Could it be that Frank Rich is wrong, and that this pretentious left-wing screed is, er, just a pretentious left-wing screed?
ANOTHER 'ANGELS' REVIEW: "I turned it off after the first hour. As a socially progressive Republican from a Catholic background, I was looking forward to what promised to be a nice mix of spirituality and commentary on one of our most pressing cultural issues. It wasn't the leftist propaganda that turned me off - although that certainly didn’t help - but the biggest problem I had with the film was that it was just a bad movie. The scenes of the movie that supposedly brought spirituality into the mix were a convoluted mess that reminded me of a cheesy play. The characters weren't written poorly, but the screenplay wasn't written well as a whole. Pacino, of course, carried the movie as much as he could. And the one thing that could have redeemed the film, its attempt at humor, failed miserably - even the supposedly humorous scenes seemed to turn their nose up at the audience. More than anything, it was just a long, drawn out, poorly written film that exuded a holier-than-thou leftist elitism. I just wish critics would have the guts to say so."
CRITIQUES OF 'ANGELS': Here are two actual reviews of "Angels in America," the leftist play hailed by every living critic as a masterpiece for the ages. Dale Peck sees its datedness, as well as its merits. Timothy Hulsey is much tougher. Money quote:
"The scenes and speeches in Angels never add up, perhaps because Kushner's characters don't change or progress much over time. Roy Cohn, the one major character who never fails to impress audiences (and who gives actors a chance to tear off whole chunks of scenery with their teeth), starts the play as an amoral son-of-a-bitch, and ends the play as an amoral son-of-a-bitch. Prior Walter, the protagonist, begins the play as a sweet, introspective left-winger with a trust fund, and ends as a sweet, introspective left-winger with a trust fund. You'd think that angels and AIDS would have had more of an impact on these guys, but no." I also didn't realize that Kushner had written an earlier play equating tolerance of Ronald Reagan with aquiescence in Nazism. Ahead of his time, for a change.
ANGELS DROOPS: The most brilliant, ground-breaking, revolutionary work of art since, er, Frank Rich started writing for the New York Times slipped again in the ratings last week. Its first audience of 4.2 million slipped to 2.9 million for the finale, according to Hollywood Reporter. A reader's defense of 'Angels' can be read here.
I used to enjoy reading your blog, though I didn't always agree with your politics. However, after reading this continual diatribe against "Angels," I've lost my taste for your writing. You're more concerned with scoring points against Kushner than giving the play a decent critique. Indeed, I notice you haven't cited any positive reviews of "Angels" in your blog. But I guess when you're pushing an agenda, that's not too important.
CROCODILE HUNTER OR THE HUNTED?
SOME INITIAL REFLECTIONS ON LIBERTY AND POWER
PORTENTS OF A BOSNIA SCENARIO FOR IRAQ?
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